I wrote last week about Richard I. Anderson‘s class on User-Centered Design and Usability, and more thoughts occurred to me about how I found myself advocating for more user involvement in all phases of design and engineering while in fact I wanted to free my creative spirit.

I am retired, and I have happily tried various creative endeavors: writing short stories and poetry, playing the piano, taking photos, sewing, dancing, etc. I remember my best moments in my early days at work were when I could write a piece of code that was, mostly, a beautiful piece of code, or finding my way out of someone else’s spaghetti code… Talking to people – users or others with alternative ideas – was hard, because they were challenging my creation. Of course, that doesn’t work well in product development, but everyone was doing it, from marketers to designers to the facility manager who had chosen the color of the walls.

It has gotten worse recently with random commenters on the web. I have stopped altogether looking at the “Comments” section of anything because someone will post something completely off topic and directed mostly at the person who dared to say something. It’s making it more difficult to shape one’s art (taken broadly as personal expression) to the taste of other humans. I have concluded in my mind that those nasty commenters are just guys spending their entire day looking at other people’s art and saying whatever they think will hurt the person the most. Lazy bullies. I sometimes think the real world is better now because the bullies are busy inside their own room and won’t bother harassing us on the street.

Anyway, back to creativity vs. making products: I found myself in that situation when I showed a little “plant cozy” I had made to the owner of my favorite plant shop. I had just made it and put the plant I was buying as a gift in it, when the shop owner said they could sell things like those. I enthusiastically went home and made more in different sizes and fabrics to “check those out”, but I realized I would be bored to death making them as products, because when I sewed the first one I was making it with the intention of gifting it to a particular individual. Sure enough after I showed what I made to the shop owner, they came back with all sorts of new requirements, and each was, in a sense, challenging what I loved to do. A good conclusion, but at the same time I understood how difficult it was to be making actual products, working in an organization.

Then today I read this article: Eight Lessons From My Research on Creativity, and every lesson sounded so true. Even if you’re doing great art, you’re going to have to sell it one way or another, and you will have to modify your ways to find a comfortable situation.