I’m headed back into the private sector with hopes of reaching more people that value good design. My stint with the government has been a good one and I wish them good luck, but one must always be moving forward. One of the things I must say goodbye to is my installation of sketches on office supplies.

It started out as decoration for my workspace, but I soon realized that no amount of decoration could change the drabness that was innate from the cubicles and neutral materials and colors. Everything in these typical workspaces are built to fit the masses’ general needs which never meets your own requirements ironically. It must reflect your concept of home or your perception of perfection for it to be worthwhile. No one wants to go to a place that bores them to tears for a third of their life.

Since decoration wasn’t enough, I had to change the space I was in because predictable angles and flatness isn’t conducive for real creative thinking. Nothing kills creativity like looking around and thinking: boxes, boxes, grey boxes, boxes… I started putting up sketches that hung and hovered with tape instead of posting them directly onto the wall. After a month or so of making a sketch a day, had a nice web of creativity. The months after only made it more dense.

I was particularly interested in the shadows it produced as that kind of environment generally lacks depth and definition. The strong flood of overhead fluorescent light combined with dull materials and surfaces tend to create very flat and description-less spaces. The shadows reminded me that I was still in this world and that what I did mattered to the natural world. It wasn’t yet the pointless world described in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

With the constraints of time and a very politically sensitive work environment, it isn’t as expressive as it could be, but I’m happy with the results. It was fun seeing something unnaturally organic grow and it sure made coming to the office much more enjoyable — and as we all know, more fun means for productivity.

So why do we have to deal with so much bad design? At some point, someone decided that it was more important to cut costs during expansion to make bigger profits. The target audience’s comfort should never be compromised for the greater good. It’s when we stop thinking about the little things that the larger things begin to suffer. We may not see the effects of it for a while, but it will return to haunt — it always does. Too many entities expand too quickly while disregarding the little things that matter. This is why we don’t have nice things.