Is the decline of elitism of creativity inevitable?

Productivity vs. Creativity

“Do you think that the importance of creativity is declining?”

I recently posed this question to my wife. She spent most of her career in HR and doesn’t think about creativity or creative endeavors like I do. At the beginning of the pandemic, she left her cushy corporate job and decided to pursue being a life/career coach. Now as an independent professional, she creates way more content on various platforms than I do. Yet, she wouldn’t identify herself as a creative or a creator.

I’ve spent more than two decades as a creative. Quality over quantity has always been the mantra for us, the so-called Creative Class. Producing “less but better stuff” was what we were taught. Mediocrity, or settling for “good enough,” was the enemy. We worshiped the cult of perfectionism.

I’ve been sensing for a while now that, in the modern, technology-driven, and efficiency-obsessed society we live in today, we put less value on creativity and increasingly more on productivity. Producing “more but good enough stuff” seems to have become the new mantra.

Countless creators sing the gospel of consistency, frequency, and productivity.

In just the last 24 months, the number of self-proclaimed social media growth coaches and personal branding gurus seems to have exploded on Instagram, LinkedIn, and the platform formerly known as Twitter.

The pandemic accelerated this trend. While the cost of and the demand for elite colleges higher education didn’t get disrupted as much as some experts thought they would be, online courses' popularity rose significantly, from the elite end of the spectrum to the opposite end. Yet another way for Ivy League schools to make even more money.

In addition, many creators have now figured out how the algorithms of various platforms work. The platforms benefit when more people are posting more content more frequently. Creators desperate for irrational emotional affirmations in the form of followers and likes are willingly uploading stuff in masse and for free.

Furthermore, the format of content-i.e. Reels on Instagram-is now overshadowing the substance of content. Posts that tout “Use trending audio for your Reel and watch your account grow!” “Post _ times a week to gain more followers!” or those strangely quick and short clips that you have to watch and stop several times to see what’s going on proliferate the Explore feeds. We see numerous posts that have the same formats and techniques. Sure, they may have a large number of likes and followers but are they truly memorable? Probably not because there are so many.

These formulas are providing these creators with shortcuts for reach and growth. Everyone loves a good shortcut.

One thing that is common among them, however, is that only a fraction of them encourage people to be original or creative.

Put another way, algorithms of the online world are pushing creators and creatives towards quantity and formulas and away from quality or creativity.

The great thing about formulas is that they work, especially in the age of algorithms, while they work. The problem is that platforms and their algorithms are a moving target and change frequently and unpredictably. In a few years, 90% of these creators who chase formulas will either get tired of chasing them and/or algorithms will render them irrelevant.

Tools don’t make us smarter

The sense, or worry, I should admit, that productivity is overtaking creativity occurred to me as I was listening to a podcast in which the two hosts discuss the topic of productivity, and specifically, note-taking rather enthusiastically. This conversation fascinated me.

To begin with, I didn’t realize that there was a passionate cohort of note-taking aficionados out there. For Casey Newton-one of the hosts, a tech journalist who runs Platformer-note-taking is a professional obsession. He seems to organize his notes meticulously, and even mercilessly, and takes the task to a level that I never really thought about. He keeps a highly organized record of every link his articles on Platformer have referenced in Notion and uses a newly discovered note-taking tool called Capacities.io that helps “networked thoughts.”

His co-host, Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for the New York Times, is on the opposite end of the spectrum. His method, he reveals, is surprisingly low-tech for a tech journalist: emailing himself or taking voice notes in the Voice Memo app whenever ideas occur. He admits self-deprecatingly that his method, particularly the voice notes, makes searching for those ideas later almost impossible, ironically defeating the purpose of taking notes. He says he experimented with various note-taking tools, only to find himself getting frustrated with them 24 to 48 hours later and reverting to his archaic method of keeping a record of his ideas.

To be honest, I’m much closer to Roose than Newton on the spectrum of productivity savviness. For years, I’ve tried different means of taking notes/jotting ideas down/making to-do lists and I’m yet to find a system that I’m satisfied with. I did sign up for Capacities.io, opened it, but was immediately intimidated and went back to Notes.

While Newton advocates for productivity tools, he argues that note-taking apps don’t make us smarter in his article on Platformer.

In short, it is probably a mistake, in the end, to ask for software to improve our thinking. […] The reason, sadly, is that thinking takes place in your brain. And thinking is an active pursuit — one that often happens when you are spending long stretches of time staring into space, then writing a bit, and then staring into space a bit more. It’s here that the connections are made and the insights are formed. And it is a process that stubbornly resists automation.

Authenticity

I spoke at an event in Croatia last year and met Chris Do, the self-proclaimed “Loud Introvert, helping left-brainers, think right™.” On Instagram alone, he has close to a million followers, and on LinkedIn close to half a million. He’s a household name in the design community.

Although I didn’t get to know him directly until last year, I remember his firm Blind, a motion graphics company, more than a decade, if not two, ago in my twenties. Only a few years older than me and a designer like myself, I was very impressed with Chris running an Emmy-winning design company at a relatively young age. In the last decade, he shifted his work focus towards coaching and educating other designers to build businesses.

At a breakfast table of the event, we started chatting. My wife was with me and complimented Chris on his talk the day earlier. She mentioned how useful it was to her and wished that she could build her online presence more. He in return asked her what she did — a life career coach. When I bring my partner to an industry event where I’m speaking, people are usually more interested in talking to me. So it was rare and refreshing that a high-caliber speaker like Chris showed an interest in what my wife did.

The next question he asked her surprised both of us. “Can I help you?”

Here’s someone who has more than a million followers on social media, gets approached all the time for advice, and charges $5,000/hr for a 1-on-1 coaching session for personal branding. With this question, he wasn’t selling his service to her. He sounded genuinely interested in what my wife did and helping her on the spot. There was no agenda beyond that. It was authentic.

Creative and design industries are filled with big personalities and egos. In fact, regardless of the industry, anyone who is as successful and as well-known as Chris would have a big personality and be self-obsessed, and not be interested in talking about others.

Before meeting him, I admired Chris for his ability and tenacity to produce high-quality content on such frequency. During my two-decade-plus career, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who cared enough about a random stranger who wasn’t even in the same industry and offered to help. This personal encounter with him made me realize that it’s his authenticity that put him in a whole different class.

The long run

Towards the end of the podcast, Newton provides a few practical tips for staying organized and being productive. While he comments Reese’s basic use of technology is “horrible,” his last advice to his co-host is simple and refreshingly technology-independent.

“Keep a daily journal as a bullet list in the morning.”

In 2022, Drake supposedly released 57 or 58 tracks in one year alone. That’s more than one track a week. Even at his level of fame, when one’s descent from fame is as quick as someone else ascending and replacing them, he is savvy enough to understand that aiming for a stroke of genius every few years could be dangerous for his career. Instead, he is producing more in the Attention Economy we now live in to engage his audience more effectively, frequently, and consistently.

Statistically speaking, in baseball, a player who hits a single consistently has a higher chance of becoming a Hall of Famer than a player who becomes a home run winner in a few seasons.

It now seems that to be creative, we first need to produce more with consistency. Creatives need not be the hostage of quality, at least to begin with. While we should try to understand algorithms and need to produce more to stay relevant, that doesn’t mean we need to be subservient to algorithms. In fact, we should resist hacks, tricks, and gimmicks, to truly break away and stand out.

Sure, we can chase algorithms in an effort to grow our audience. In the long run, however, authenticity will prevail.

Thanks for reading. Add your notes with any feedback, thoughts, or questions. I’d love to hear from you.

Originally published at https://reiinamoto.substack.com.

The cult of productivity was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As creative managers, we take it personally when creatives quit. How should we cope?

When we quit

I don’t have a good track record of quitting or doing well when people on my team/at my company quit.

First, about my track record of quitting.

I didn’t last long in my first job. Fresh out of school and after having applied to several hundred positions over ten months in New York City, I finally got hired as a junior designer by a small but rapidly growing digital marketing agency. But after about 18 months, the agency that hired me got acquired, my boss left (or got pushed out, not sure), and overnight, the company that I had joined disappeared.

After that, my first steady job was at R/GA, a celebrated design and technology company in the special effects and computer graphics industry as it was transitioning into a digital creative and marketing agency. For the first two years, it was a revolving door of various bosses. The transition R/GA was going through was quite drastic. In hindsight, as a more mature-and perhaps slightly scarred-creative with perspectives on change, it made sense there was instability and high turnovers. For someone in their early/mid-twenties, however, it was disorienting. That led me to look for other jobs and I almost quit.

But then I couldn’t.

For those of us who are “legal aliens” (yes, an actual term used by the government) in the US on a visa, specifically an H-1B visa which is what I had, we are tied to the employer. For us to switch jobs, the new employer would have to agree to sponsor our visas. That process could take months and there was no guarantee that the visa would be granted. In my case, one company was willing to hire me until they realized that it would take too long.

I ended up staying at R/GA for over five years but didn’t officially have a boss there. That exposed me, for better or worse, to Bob Greenberg, the legendary founder and CEO of R/GA and the industry icon. With that, I inevitably got opportunities-or more accurately, had no choice but-to present work to and in front of him.

In his late fifties at the time, Bob had some heavy hitters as clients. Ian Schrager (the founder of Studio 54, Ian Schrager Hotels, and Edition Hotels), Richard Saul Wurman (the founder of TED), and Edwin Schlossberg (the husband of Caroline Kennedy), to name a few.

For such high-profile clients, projects I got to work on were similarly eclectic: a website for one of the hippest hotels in the world. An event opening title sequence for the most sought-after conference. A 50-story, multi-screen display for a building in the middle of Time Square. Though they could be challenging and intimidating for someone half their age, I got to do some diverse and interesting work.

The experience I got at R/GA during that era was invaluable. I consider myself a product of that company. Many designers and colleagues of my generation stayed there for a decade or more. Those who left became design and creative leaders of companies like Apple, Instagram, Google, and so forth. In a way, R/GA was the design nursery of Silicon Valley. It may have been good that I couldn’t quit in the first few years. The universe works in mysterious ways.

So why did I quit?

I mean, with those clients and diverse, interesting types of work I was doing, I was very happy.

There were a few reasons for me to move on at the time I did, though.

One, opportunities came knocking on my door. In my late twenties, I started to get phone calls and emails from headhunters of other agencies and that got me curious about what was outside the fences, literally as R/GA’s building in Hell’s Kitchen of NYC was surrounded by fences.

Second, I didn’t know if I was doing good work just because I was at R/GA or because I was actually any good. Am I just benefitting from the name and the team I’m on? Or am I making the team better? I wasn’t sure.

I decided to leave because I wanted to really test myself, challenge myself, and even make myself uncomfortable.

However, quitting R/GA didn’t go so smoothly. R/GA was the digital agency of record for Nike in the US. When I told people that I was going to AKQA, less prominent and not well known in the US at the time, their reactions ranged from “AK-what?” and “Why?” to “You are making a mistake.” AKQA was also working with Nike but in the UK and Asia. Someone even told me, “That’s like going from the Premier League to MLS.” Okay, the regions are mixed up in this metaphor, but if you know, you know.

One team was essentially stealing talent from another for the same client. This caused a lot of tension between the two agencies and a strain on the client. So much so that the client had to intervene and mediate a gentlemen’s agreement between the two to not poach talent from each other. This lasted for years.

I thought I’d try to give it five years at AKQA and see how things would turn out. I stayed for close to 11 years.

When others quit

Now about my track record of having creatives quit.

I did a little bit of hiring and managing creatives when I was at R/GA but it was at AKQA where I spent a significant amount of time recruiting, managing, leading, and very occasionally and unfortunately, letting people go.

Between 2005 and 2015, the agency grew tenfold organically. I went from managing a team of about 25 people in one office as an Executive Creative Director with another colleague, PJ Pereira, to representing hundreds of creatives across 14 offices around the world as the Global Chief Creative Officer. We became the first agency to receive five Agency of the Year accolades in a span of just a few years. By the time I left, AKQA was pushing 2,000 employees. I wouldn’t trade my experience there for anything else. I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now if it wasn’t for AKQA.

During my tenure, I reviewed probably more than 10,000 resumes and portfolios, interviewed hundreds of, if not over a thousand, people, and hired quite a few. I’ve seen numerous cycles of people coming and going.

When that cycle happens and people are about to quit, there are some tells.

When we used to see each other in person almost every day before COVID, some of those tells were more noticeable. So-and-so is gone in the middle of the day for no particular reason. Or they show up to the office late but rather well-dressed. In the post-pandemic, remote work world, those tells have become less visible.

But the lack of visibility is another kind of tell.

A turned-off Zoom camera, blocked calendar slots with no particular agenda, or people being oddly distant and disengaged on Slack, are such invisible tells. These then are followed by a “Can we have a chat/do you have a minute?” Slack message, or more commonly, a “Quick check-in” calendar invite that shows up on our calendar suddenly and randomly.

Geez, I sound like a f***ing creepy boss.

When I got into the position of hiring and managing people in my twenties, I wasn’t mature enough (note: I’m a man) and I didn’t know how to deal well with people quitting. Now in my forties, I’ve developed an occupational spider-sense. Even after more than 15 years, though, I still get a pit in my stomach when I see such a Slack message or a calendar invite pop up. I hate it when people quit.

We, as bosses to others, aren’t machines. We have feelings. Having someone quit can be an emotional process even if we put up a facade that might not seem so.

Here are a few coping mechanisms I’ve developed as a boss over the years.

1. Don’t react. Listen.

Regardless of the eventual outcome of someone staying or leaving, when one of our reports comes to us to have that “chat,” it’s natural to react on the spot. Even if we suppress our emotions on the surface, it hurts on the inside.

To compensate, we subconsciously end up talking more than we normally do. Maybe it’s just me. I’ve certainly caught myself talking more than the person who came to resign. In those cases, I almost always regretted later that I said too much or what I said.

That’s precisely when we need to hold back what we want to say and listen to what they say and don’t say. And even if we have things we think we should say, we need to wait at least overnight and digest it first.

Don’t react. Listen. Especially when we feel those emotions inside of us.

2. Counteroffers are useless (9 out of 10 times).

By the time one of our creatives comes to us to have the “chat,” it’s usually too late.

Earlier in my managerial career, I was told by a more experienced manager colleague that I should always try to counteroffer, especially if I wanted to keep them.

However, I’ve learned that if I convinced people to stay with financial incentives, they would end up leaving in six to twelve months. It was just a matter of time before someone else would offer more money than we could.

What felt even worse was that we made counteroffers and they would still leave. For these reasons, I stopped making counteroffers a long time ago. Competing with money, even more so now, is futile.

What we need to show people isn’t just more money. We need to show that we care about and value them. Sometimes, part of the reason for that “chat” is people subconsciously just want to know how much we value them.

So when is that one time we should make a counteroffer? It’s when we think we can cultivate a mutually beneficial path forward for the individual and the company. Be generous with the money within reason but more importantly, about their future with us.

3. Creatives are like flowers. They need the right amount of sunlight, water, and space.

This statement might rub some people the wrong way. But I used to be one of those flowers.

If I got some critical feedback about my work, I would take it personally and it would take me several days to come back to my normal self on the inside. If I didn’t get praised for my work or my work wasn’t chosen, I would feel insecure and worry that I wasn’t good enough. But too much praise would have made my head too big.

The thing about flowers is that they don’t tell us when or how much sunlight and water they need. It’s our job as a boss to approach the creatives, nurture them, and help them bloom. Don’t put it on them to come talk to us. Approach them ourselves and talk to them proactively and regularly, with enough space. Otherwise, they’ll suffocate.

4. If you love them, set them free.

Sometimes, we just have to accept the fact they want to move on for whatever reason.

If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it’s yours. If not, it was never meant to be.

This quote applies to managing creatives but part of this quote that doesn’t apply is that they aren’t ours.

There are a few, not many, creatives that I’ve hired more than once. Many that have left, they’ve kept in touch with me-and I give them credit for keeping in touch-for many years, even after more than a decade. They’ve become my brothers and sisters, many younger, some similar age or older.

What’s ours to keep isn’t their employment. It’s the relationships. And it’s up to us, not them, to keep them.

A year after I left R/GA and joined AKQA (and before the aforementioned gentlemen’s agreement was in place), Bob called me and asked if I would be interested in returning. I said I wasn’t quite ready. Another year after that, he asked me if I would be available for lunch. Of course, I said. And just last year, he asked me if I could contribute to a side project he was working on. It had been 17 years since I left R/GA in 2005.

It’s nice to know that one of your old bosses still thinks of you almost two decades later.

The true character of a boss shows when one quits.

Thanks for reading.

Originally published at https://reiinamoto.substack.com.

When creatives quit was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There is no such thing as a perfect boss but these seven traits might help identify the good ones

The first boss

The first boss I ever had in the creative industry was Noriyuki Tanaka, a legendary artist/designer in Japan in the 1990s. I managed to get an apprenticeship position at his studio as I was about to graduate from college through an acquaintance who made an introduction to him for me.

Not even 40 yet, Noriyuki-san was a prolific star designer/artist who was producing an eclectic body of creative work. He did client work to earn money and would use that money to create his own artwork and organize art shows. His approach to creativity was pure, ambitious, yet practical all at the same time.

To this day, the experience I got under him remains the most intense one I ever had in my 20+ career.

After I left his studio, his stardom became even more stellar. He created the first TV spot for Nike in Japan in the 1990s. Later, he became the first creative director for Uniqlo and helped make it a major apparel player in Japan well before it became the internationally recognized brand that it is today.

He was the best and possibly the trickiest first boss to work for.

I say this with the utmost respect and a lot of love. I told him as much when I saw him a few years ago over sushi in Tokyo.

He was the best because his pursuit of creativity was relentless. Until I worked for him, I didn’t know how one would earn a living by being creative. He may not be well known outside of Japan, but his work was world-class and some of the most creative and artistic work I’ve ever seen. Without his tutelage, I wouldn’t be here. Period.

When I now tell people in the industry in Japan that I worked under Noriyuki-san, they all get impressed, even 25 years after the fact. He’s one of the very few people I know directly for whom the word “genius” is used. He was and still is a man of legends.

And that’s often followed by “Did he ever show up on time?” He was notorious for not being punctual. Another one of many legendary tales of Noriyuki-san.

He had very little if any, grasp of time. He was so bad about managing the time that it was completely unpredictable what time he would show up. Being late three hours to a meeting was the norm. Japan, as some readers might know, is a painfully punctual society where a minister was forced to apologize because he was three minutes late to a meeting, or a train company delivered a formal apology because one of its trains left a station just 20 seconds too early.

Even with his lack of punctuality, he still kept his clients. Noriyuki-san was that good.

His studio was just him and his art director/designer. I joined as a very inadequate third leg of the stool. There was no job description for the position because, well, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

My job included anything and everything. My day started with cleaning the bathroom, sweeping the floors, taking the trash and heaps of cigarettes out (the studio had no cleaning service), answering emails and phone calls, scheduling meetings (a tricky endeavor, see above), delivering disks to the vendor (the Internet wasn’t fast enough to handle heavy files), bringing printed work back to the studio before we showed them to clients, etc. In between these, I asked for bits and pieces of design work that I could get from my superior art director and tried to touch as much of the studio’s work as possible.

In the 1970s and 80s, the Japanese word “karoshi (overwork death)” became known outside of Japan. The corporate culture in the 1990s when I started working there hadn’t drastically improved.

This, coupled with Noriyuki-san’s lack of time management, made my working hours just insane. The day would start around 11am and it would continue until about 6am the next morning (yes, 19-hour day). I would go home to take a shower, doze off for a couple of hours, and then be back at the studio around 11am the next day. This happened 4 or 5 days out of the 6 days a week that I worked. It was a brutal introduction to the creative industry.

It sounds horrible, I know. Still, I now appreciate the exposure to the level of creativity from my first boss at the very beginning of my career.

“I had to clean up my act,” said Noriyuki-san with a shrug over drinks after that sushi dinner. He told me he got his lifestyle in order, now manages his time better, quit smoking, and started eating much more healthily. Granted, this was around 1am, so maybe not the healthiest but it’s all relative. Regardless, he looks remarkably young for someone who is over 60.

Seven traits

Since Noriyuki-san, I’ve had several bosses, as one would, over the course of my 25-year career. If I were honest, not every boss was great, but that’s ok, there is no such thing as a perfect boss. I learned something from everyone.

Here are the traits that I observed and valued from various bosses. Combined, they might give us an idea of what we should look for in a boss.

1. Motivate

Although not the easiest job, what I appreciated about working under Noriyuki-san was, in addition to his relentless appetite for never-been-done ideas, his way of motivating us that I grew to appreciate, even years after I had left his studio.

In the early days of my apprenticeship, I remember him telling me, upon showing my work, “You have something better in you. Why don’t you iterate and find it?”

Much like a good coach who can make us a better player, a good boss pushes, not forces, us to a new height that we didn’t reach on our own. They can motivate and elevate us beyond our abilities.

2. Have a superpower

Every boss that I respected, even if they might have been flawed, had some kind of superpower.

One knew how to tell a story. Really well.

Another had such magnetic and infectious energy around clients that made them enamored and naturally want to work with us.

One designer boss I knew had such a strong command of keyboard shortcuts of design software that watching him design was like watching someone playing the piano.

David Ogilvy, one of the advertising tycoons of the 20th century, recalled his days working in the kitchen of the Hotel Majestic in Paris and said that whenever the executive chef picked up the knife to cook, everyone in the kitchen was in awe of the master at work.

A good boss has some superpower that we aspire to.

3. Take action

“What do you think we should do differently at this company?” One Japanese CEO that I work with asked me out of the blue a few years ago. I told him that they needed more females in the position of power. A year later, the CEO named a female leader as a regional CEO. It might not sound like a big step but in a male-dominated corporate culture of Japan, this was a rarity and I was impressed by the fact he took action.

4. Have our back

Back in 2002, an employee suggested to Tadashi Yanai, the global CEO of UNIQLO and its parent company Fast Retailing, that they start a grocery business selling fruits and vegetables. The logic was that UNIQLO had such a strong understanding of supply chain management that they could apply the know-how to the distribution of fresh produce and eliminate waste.

All the board members were against it, but Yanai was not. “Try it.”

Less than two years later, UNIQLO lost more than 30 billion yen (≈$20 million) and decided to halt the venture. Feeling accountable for the failure, the employee gave a resignation letter to Yanai.

“What are you talking about? Use the experience for the next time and earn back the money we lost,” said Yanai to the employee with a laugh.

This employee was Osamu Yunoki who later started GU, a younger sibling brand to UNIQLO, and made it the second biggest brand within Fast Retailing. Yunoki is the CEO of GU.

When a boss has our back, it could be more empowering than one would ever imagine.

5. Listen to our needs

Tom Bedecarre, the former CEO of AKQA, was the person who hired me back in 2004. At the time, AKQA was virtually unknown within the industry. I thought I would give it a try for a few years and see what would happen. I ended up staying there for more than a decade.

Throughout that time, Tom would always ask me what I wanted to do and accomplish. At times I had some clear goals and desires, other times, not so. What Tom did was always listen and gave me different opportunities. This meant that I was able to have multiple roles and grew in ways I didn’t imagine I could.

6. Care about us

In my early twenties, I had an accident while playing soccer after work and lost my eyesight in one of my eyes. It was a retinal detachment and a few other complications that required multiple surgeries.

Bog Greenberg, the founder and CEO of R/GA, heard about my injury a few days after the incident. He made a point of coming to my desk to bring a yellow sticky note with a phone number on it.

“I just talked to one of the best eye doctors in the country about your injury. He’s in New York. Call this number now,” said Bob.

I dialed and talked to Dr. Stanley Chang and got to see him right away. In addition, Bob gave me a check for $6,000 or 7,000 to cover the deductible that I had to pay to the insurance company for my surgery.

I’m forever grateful for the level of care Bob gave to me.

7. Admit mistakes

“I am sorry” are the three most difficult words for bosses to say, especially male ones. But when a boss is man enough to admit their mistake(s) and actually apologizes, that can be a powerful means of connection.

Many years ago, an old boss of mine apologized to me after a rather unpleasant exchange we had. He was sincere, which made such a positive impression on me that my level of respect increased quite a bit after that. That incident made me trust him more.

Writing these now, I realize that I’ve been fortunate enough to have some amazing bosses. That now makes me want to try harder to be a better boss to the people around me. I hope I can make a fraction of the difference for them that my former bosses made for me.

There are many more bosses I’ve had over the years that I didn’t have room here to mention. Every one of them made an impact on me and I’m one way or another a product of their influence. I hope to see them in person one day again and tell them how much their mentorship meant to me.

Thanks for reading. If you like what you read, please subscribe and get my newsletter, every week directly in your inbox.

Originally published at https://reiinamoto.substack.com.

Seven traits of a good boss was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

To stay relevant in an age of automation, we need to move upstream, not downstream.

“I am an AI designer.”

When I was in high school and college, I devoured printed graphic design materials.

They were album covers from labels like Factory Records, posters for artists like Bjork, and magazines like Ray Gun, Emigre, and Japanese publications such as Idea. I admired star graphic designers and design studios like David Carson, Peter Saville, tomato, and the Attik. In design competitions, annual reports made regular appearances. As I couldn’t yet afford expensive design books, I used to spend hours in the university library and the art section of bookstores.

I thought I would follow the path of becoming a graphic designer in the traditional sense.

While I was in college, the Internet, or the World Wide Web, almost overnight, became a thing that people got obsessed about, much like AI today. After graduating, I moved to NYC, where the web industry was rapidly growing. “Web design” suddenly became an option for designers, at least as a career entry point for me.

“Tell the landlord you are a web designer, not a graphic designer.”

That was the piece of advice I got when I was looking for an apartment. That’s how much the Internet economy was starting to boom. I borrowed money from my parents to last for a few months and lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment with my twin brother in a sketchy neighborhood in Brooklyn. We only got the apartment not because I was a web designer (I wasn’t as I didn’t have a job) but because the Albanian landlord took pity on us two young Japanese guys trying to make it in NYC.

Every week, I would look up job listings in a magazine called Silicon Alley Reporter and started applying for numerous design jobs and roles.

The combination of being fresh out of school, new to the City, and with no connection was a hurdle to begin with. Add “need H1-B visa” to that mix, no employer was willing to take a chance on a designer with no experience. I made ends meet by taking on random freelance web design gigs, like designing and coding web articles for $150/piece. I could barely get by.

Even with the “web designer” title on my resume, no company would still hire me. With a lot of time on my hands for many months, I reworked my printed portfolio into an interactive online portfolio. I had double-majored in art and computer science in college and knew a little about programming languages like C, C++, and Java. In addition to traditional design and art pieces, I had a few interactive typographic pieces, inspired by another role model of mine John Maeda who had told me to learn programming a few years prior.

It wasn’t the fact that I claimed to be a web designer that helped me land a job. It was my design taste mixed with technical skills that ended up differentiating me as a designer. My book wasn’t necessarily better than other designers. It was different.

If you tell your prospective landlord today that you are a web designer, your application will likely be denied. In recent years, landlords in NYC might be favoring job titles like “digital product designer.” In 2023, “prompt designer” or “AI designer” might give you a better chance.

“The term ‘AI artist’ irks me,” I heard an artist grumble recently. “If you are asking AI to do the work for you, you aren’t really an artist.”

While I can sympathize with this artist’s sentiment, it won’t stop the wave of AI as well as a whole lot of mediocrity from being generated.

A cautionary tale

Speaking of AI and people revolting against technology, there are several analogous cases from the past. One such case is elevator buttons.

It was in 1892 when the first elevator buttons were invented and introduced. Until then, elevators needed trained human operators to function. This invention made it possible for passengers to just press a button and be taken to the desired floor.

“So what happened to elevator operators? Nothing.”

Kevin Roose, a NY Times technology columnist, mentioned this story on the podcast “Hard Fork” a few weeks ago, referring to the wave of automated elevators that people thought would take over their jobs. That week, he was attending the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity where he heard an abundance of talks and mentions of AI but in actuality, he didn’t observe innovative or revolutionary use of AI. The point Roose was trying to make with the elevator story was that it might take longer for AI to take over human labor and tasks than we currently anticipate.

In reality, it took a long time for elevator buttons to become common. Over 50 years in fact.

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, elevators remained human-operated. The core issue in automated elevators was mistrust. Humans just didn’t feel safe in elevators without other humans operating them.

From the 1920s to the 1960s, there were several strikes, notably in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, by elevator operators mainly protesting low wages and brutally long working hours. The irony of these strikes is that they became the catalyst that sped up elevator automation.

The strikes forced elevator manufacturers to think of ways to make riders feel safe. In the few years following a massive strike in 1945 in New York City that cost an estimated $100 million in economic loss to the City, companies started to introduce human interface elements within elevators that would provide a better sense of safety: emergency stop buttons, embedded phoneµ to let the riders talk to remote operators, and alarms were such safety measures.

Finally, in 1950, the first operatorless elevator was installed at the Atlantic Refining Building in Dallas. That marked the beginning of the end of elevator operators. “By the 1970s most elevators operated without human operators,” writes Henry Lawson Greenidge in his article “ How A Historic Strike Paved the Way for the Automated Elevator.” Resistance proved to be futile.

This may be a cautionary tale for the Writer Guild of America.

More with less

“I have to work much harder now.”

A seasoned photographer friend of mine lamented over afternoon coffee a few years ago.

In his fifties, he has been a still-life photographer in New York City for over 30 years. His expertise is shooting cosmetics products for major brands like Estée Lauder, Shiseido, Clinique, and MAC, among others, and his work has graced many magazine pages, posters, and billboards. Each photo he takes is carefully crafted, curated, and choreographed. In his field, he is established enough that he could command, I speculate, five figures relatively easily. If he does one or two of those assignments a month, he could earn a comfortable living even in an expensive city like New York City. From what I could gather, he’s done alright.

“I used to spend an entire day setting up one shot. Now I have to do ten shots a day.”

For a similar kind of fee, he says his clients nowadays demand much more work from him.

During his career, he has seen a dramatic evolution in technology. He is old enough to have started his career in the days of film. I’m also old enough to have learned film photography when I was in high school. We could shoot only up to 36 photos on one roll of film. We would develop film and print photos in the darkroom, and the process would take hours if not overnight.

This process now requires no discernible skill, talent, or special equipment. It barely takes milliseconds, if that. And it produces exponentially more volume. In 2023, over 85% of all photos are now taken on smartphones.

With generative AI, we don’t even need a camera or a smartphone to shoot. We can just… generate.

Soon, my photographer friend could be asked to do a hundred shots, if not more, a day for less money.

Or, he may not even be asked at all. If he’s in a race to the bottom, that is.

Creativity is the only job left

Obviously and admittedly, being an elevator operator and being a creative are drastically different professions.

Just as getting on an elevator without a human operator was unthinkable, automatically generating sentences and images were unfathomable before generative AI. Now, just with a few keystrokes, we can generate.

Nike’s mission statement reads “If you have a body, you are an athlete.” The same idea could apply to creativity: if you can type, you can be a creative.

Throughout history, technology democratized creativity. Cameras allowed people to create realistic images without being a skilled painter. Vinyl gave DJs new ways to make music. Smartphones made everyone a decent photographer. Squarespace didn’t make everyone a web designer but it did give access to good-enough web design for everyone for free.

While technology de-industrializes creative professions, it forces creative professionals to adapt.

David Lee, the Chief Creative Officer of Squarespace and an old friend of mine, made a few points that I thought are useful in framing how humanity can thrive in an age of machine automation.

1. Designers and creatives, move upstream.

My photographer friend, instead of trying to shoot more shots per day, changed his methodologies as well as outputs. He decided to move upstream and now directs product photography and videography for cosmetics as well as technology hardware companies by leveraging his experience. He’s now incorporating AI into his process.

Move upstream, not downstream.

2. Taste is the new skill

Anything that can be repeated is going to be automated by machines. If we are doing the same task day in and day out, we need to watch out.

The phrase “Taste is the new skill” is from the digital artist Claire Silver. “With the rise of AI, for the first time, the barrier of skill is swept away.”

Taste was always the skill creatives needed to have to succeed. As David put it, what’s old is new again.

The aforementioned photographer, with years of experience and training, has better taste and better creative judgment than those without. His taste is the differentiator.

3. Creativity is the only job left

Making the work used to be a big part of creativity. That may be changing slightly. As the barrier to entry for making creative things gets lower, there will be more premium on ideas. Those who can come up with original thoughts will continue to be the ones to thrive in an age of machines.

And that requires a race to the top, not to the bottom.

To listen to my conversation with David Lee, please take a listen here:

Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thriving-in-an-age-of-automation/id1669660940?i=1000622567070

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/70iEWujVum92KesRYZQJIU

If you like what you read, please subscribe for my weekly newsletter at https://reiinamoto.substack.com.

Thanks for reading.

– rei ★

Originally published at https://reiinamoto.substack.com.

Race to the top was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.