Sean Voisen

First of all, I should begin with a quick summary of this year’s FITC conference in Toronto, if at least to provide some sense of context for the impetus behind this post. FITC was, once again, a fantastic event — as inspiring as ever. Kudos to Shawn Pucknell and team for organizing this series of wonderful conferences for multimedia designers and developers year after year. As always, it was a pleasure catching up with the “usual suspects” that always show up and speak at these industry shindigs. I’m not going to name drop. You know who they are. And if you don’t, here’s a list.

But I do want to riff on the general theme of the conference, this idea behind “breaking things” — this idea of pushing creativity and technology to and beyond limits. On a couple of occasions while I was in Toronto, I had the chance to engage in some rather lengthy conversations on design and technology with Ethan Eismann, one of the lead designers at Adobe on Thermo, and also someone I had the good fortune to work with on the PayPal Desktop project a few months ago. It was during one of these conversations that Ethan said something that’s been stuck in my head ever since I returned home. He said, and I am paraphrasing with some reasonable level of verisimilitude, that he believed it was part of our job as designers and technologists to “help build tools that enable creative expression.” That we should be doing whatever we can to make it easy for people to be creative.

I don’t know why I’ve never thought about things from this perspective before, but I haven’t. Make it easy for people to be creative. It’s an idea endowed with such sense of purpose that I can’t stop thinking about it. I’ve always thought of myself as part teacher, part toolmaker. Craftsmanship and creative expression are how I derive some of the greatest joy in my life. Tools, however, can be designed and put to use for any variety of purposes. But to create tools that “make it easy for people to be creative” … ah, now that’s a noble pursuit. That’s some work with purpose.

Thanks Ethan.

This post was written in the late evening on Friday, May 2nd, 2008. You can follow any comments on this post through the post's very own RSS 2.0 feed. You can also skip to the end and leave your own 2¢, or leave a trackback from your own site.