How to write with the Devil’s hand
This week’s question comes to us from Jonathan Stephens:
You recently wrote, “...since my brain and your brain work differently, I’m going to tell you how I do it, and you can take what works for you." How does how your brain works influence or guide your design practice?
On my first day of school, Sister Anita asked us all to open our notebooks to the first page. This was exciting because it meant pulling out my new notebook, which was fresh, and I was eager to get down to some learning. She then asked us to write our name at the top of the first page. And as I reached for my pencil, Sister Anita flew from the front of the room, descended upon my desk, pulled a metal ruler of some painful thickness from some hidden recess of her nun’s habit, and brought it down on my left hand with force. I screamed, dropped my pencil, and decided organized learning was a terrible thing.
“We do not write with the devil’s hand,” she said.
She then spent the next month trying different techniques to “cure” me of my sinister affliction, including having me sit on my left hand, hold a rosary with my left hand, and tying my left hand behind my back as we practiced our writing. None of it worked of course, although the teasing and bullying from the other kids came the closest. At six years old, most of us aren’t quite ready to embrace what makes us unique. We want to be part of the accepted “norm.”
Sister Anita eventually gave up, mostly because she couldn’t make out the chicken scratch that my right hand was coming up with, and I guess she just decided that she couldn’t save us all, and I would be an acceptable sacrifice to Satan. For which I was thankful.
Our brains rule everything around us. My brain made me left-handed. As I imagine quite a few people reading this today might be. 10% of the world is left-handed, which, depending on your point of view, is either not as high a percentage as you thought, or more than you care for. Either way, hell ain’t half full, Sister Anita.
Now, I bring up left-handedness, or sinisterism (I’m not kidding), not because it’s necessarily a form of neurodivergence (although left-handedness occurs in 28% of neurodivergent people, which is interesting), but because it’s an early and very visible sign that… and here I’ll use the scientific term… this motherfucker is different. Which, at six years old, is generally not something you want to be.
I also want to make it absolutely clear that I am not an expert in neurodivergency. And if you want to read about the topic from someone who was, Steve Silberman’s NeuroTribes is an excellent book to start with. (Sadly, we lost Steve last year. RIP.)
My own expertise is in not quite fitting in, but also being kind of passable for someone who looks like they should fit in. I spent a lot of time as a kid/teen/young adult being told that I should want to be able to do certain things, and like certain things, and aim for certain types of achievements and goals, like a steady job, a nice car, and a suburban home, that people couldn’t quite figure out why I didn’t want to do what good God-fearing people considered to be “normal things.” And to be honest, now that I’ve written it all out this way, I’m considering whether my six year old self decided to live my life to spite Sister Anita, which I respect.
I am so far from answering your question that it’s kinda funny, except that it’s actually on point. My brain sometimes takes the long way around. It goes from point A to point B by visiting all the other points first and pulling in connections, and sometimes deciding that point B actually sucked, why don’t we go to point F instead? There’s punch and pie. But let’s get back to how it guides my design practice.
Very early on in my “career” (LOL) I decided I wasn’t drift compatible with working in large organizations. I just didn’t enjoy it. Which isn’t to say that I can’t work with people, there are people I absolutely love working with. We’ll come back to this point in a second. I didn’t like working in large organizations because the larger an organization is, the more likely it is to have a certain way of doing things. Which kinda makes sense, because if you have thousands of people doing things that are supposed to be interconnected, you kinda want a process that everyone can follow, or there’s complete chaos. (The fact that most organizations attempt to do this and it still results in complete chaos is also interesting, but we’re not tackling that today.) The larger an organization becomes, the more it needs everyone to work and think the same way. That way, if it loses a worker, it’s that much easier to plug in a new worker. And while that way of working might make sense for the organization, it’s important that we also ask ourselves, as workers, if it’s working for us.
I talk to a lot of designers stuck in large organizations who think there’s something wrong with them because the system they’re stuck in is making them miserable. And they try their best to make it work, which only results in more misery. Child, if I couldn’t change what hand I write with to get on almighty God’s good side, you’re not gonna change how your brain is to work at Lyft.
When Sister Anita looked out at us from her desk, I imagine it was very comforting to see us all as God’s little gears, all spinning in a heavenly direction.
Since large organizations made me miserable, I decided to spend my career in small little studios, which tend to be a bit more supportive and even gravitate more towards people who don’t spin in the same direction. Possibly because they were all started by people who don’t spin in the same direction. Or at the same speed. Or spin at all.
When we started Mule Design one of the very first rules we made for ourselves was that we would never grow beyond twelve people. I don’t know where that number came from, but it turned out to be right. Every single person we hired changed how we worked. We adapted. We didn’t hire people because they fit in, but more out of a curiosity about how adding that person would change us. We were built to adapt to people, rather than having people adapt to us. I had a way I worked. You had a way you worked. But how we worked together? That was an amazing mystery. And one we were always open to exploring. But to explore mystery, you need to be somewhere that respects the exploration and the mystery.
Because of all this, I try to be really careful about how I dole out advice to people. There is no system. There is no one way. There’s no guarantee that our brains will take us on the same journey. I’ll tell people about my own experience in doing something. I’ll tell you that we need to get from Point A to Point B. I’ll tell you how I’ve gotten there in the past, which you can use as a frame of reference, if that helps you, but then I want your brain to do its thing. Because your brain is mapping out a totally different landscape than mine is, and that is fascinating.
It’s amazing that we see the world in different ways. And if you’re thinking “finally he wrote something about design and not politics” here’s where I disappoint you. (Kinda my superpower, Chuck!) The world is full of Sister Anitas, and people who want to sell you Design Thinking™, and people who get their kicks out of laughing at the left-handed kid, and people who want to see everything spin the same way. They want order. They want sameness. But the only sameness they want is for you to be as miserable as they are. And they’re all miserable. They hate you because you’re a threat. You see what they don’t. You feel what they can’t. You can smell colors! You can read the stars. You see the connections that they can’t. You can paint something, with your own hands, that they have to fire up Three Mile Island to even attempt. You can change your body into what you need it to be. You can love who you love.
You don’t fit in.
And that is amazing.
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🔍 …speaking of workshops, Erika has a Let’s Do Design Research Right workshop starting tomorrow (Thursday) morning and she has a couple spots left.
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