Teen spirit essential to designers

Be like these dudes. Even if your 55.
By Alex Proimos from Sydney, Australia (Teenagers at Play  Uploaded by russavia)
[CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Teen spirit essential to designers

The reason I decided to become a designer: as a bright-eyed teenager my heart was ablaze with a furious passion to better a bad world. With this pair of bright eyes, I could clearly see how media was being used as a powerful tool, with all disregard to its ‘target market’, for corporate gain. With this pair of bright eyes I could see the solution: just use media against this type of media.

Media tells you to buy in order to be complete, or rather to become ‘more complete’, since ‘complete’ can never be a destination you can arrive to. Being ‘complete’, you would not longer be brainwashed by the ‘you’re just not complete yet, but if…’ basis of all advertisements.

(Add)vertisements are lies like politicians – smooth, appealing and stunningly cunning. ‘What if I could use the same structure for the opposite purposes? I’d save the world like Robin hood!’, I thought.

Teenage dreams rock. It’s not mature or even realistic, but in truth it’s braver than any adult nature. It’s the fire that fuels change, because it’s so desirably unrealistic. When dreaming of changing the world, ‘realistic’ is the problem. We don’t want things as they are. As designers it’s our nature to seek solutions that have not been identified yet.

As I was becoming a designer my ‘bright-eyed vision’ would deteriorate after spending countless hours in front of a computer. Likewise my ‘furious passion’ would fade after countless cynical remarks on my work and abilities. Eventually I was so discouraged that my teenage belief in changing the world was not sufficient strength to motivate me anymore.

I had turned blurry-eyed and dead inside - yes, it might as well be the lyrics for a 2005 Avril song. Design transformed from ‘my tool to change the world’ to just another job, allotting me to conform to the ordained system I was primarily set against.

When we grow older we reject our rebellious teenage spirit as being naïve and immature. Yet when your not content with the possibilities, it is the only attitude that is both recklessly rebellious enough to consider impossibilities, and brave enough to continue trusting in the possibility of any impossibilities.

I say: “Stuff what society says” and “stuff what critics say” – I’ve known since I was 14 that we’re not destined to fit into popular ways of thinking. Just take media as an example- it’s a mega-structure that influences millions by popularizing any idea that promises profit. 

I’m thankful I’m mature enough not to use clichéd terms like “Never give up!”, I’m also still teenage enough to know it’s true.