Design as a profession

Why don’t they want to pay us?

When fishermen get together, they’ll probably talk about fish, fishing, and the pleasures thereof. When designers get together, there’s a pretty good chance that, at some point, they’ll swap stories about clients that were reluctant to pay. Why are so many clients loath to meet their commitments to their designers?

One obvious answer is that a reluctance to pay for something that is not proven is both natural and almost inevitable. Even we designers are reluctant to buy a pig in a poke. To mix metaphors, we want to kick the tires, and take it for a spin before we separate ourselves from our hard-earned dollars. This is one reason why tradeshows have enjoyed so much success. There are many ways to expose a market to a product, but an opportunity to actually have a real visual and tactile experience of what we’ve seen in the media is very alluring.

What is ‘real’ work?

Part of what we do, as professional designers, is to project the nascent reality of our designs in as realistic a way as possible. We produce photorealistic renderings, maquettes, models, prototypes and so on, all in our pursuit of making the not-yet-real as real as possible. Unfortunately for us, though, our clients seldom have the same degree of imagination or even ability to “read” our presentations in a way that allows them to see our work as we see it. So they may be reluctant to buy in.

Another answer, although less obvious, is likely to be a bigger factor, and that is the poorly understood nature of intellectual property. What is protected, when intellectual protection is sought, is the manifestation of an idea. But it is really the idea that we seek protection for. The very idea that ideas can be property is a bit of a stretch for many people, especially those that are not in the idea business. Ideas are not even tangible, until we make them so, so how can they be property?

All of us, designers or not, produce ideas effortlessly. This may lead some to doubt that what can be obtained without effort is deserving of being compensated for. But what distinguishes those of us who are designers — that is those of us who are in the business of the production of ideas — is that we have trained ourselves to generate a specific type of idea and to improve the chances that these ideas are useful and valuable.

Ideas require investments, too

This training came at a cost and it alone represents a considerable investment on our parts. And then, the time and effort we devote to the generation of ideas, on behalf of our clients, is real and skilled work, however lacking in perspiration we may appear to be.

It is the idea that ideas can and should be eligible for protection that is the great intellectual leap that much of the wealth of our civilization rests upon. It was this perception, in the United Kingdom, that caused the Industrial Revolution to flourish there in ways that it did not elsewhere. It is the expectation that ideas can be protected that is behind the explosion of ideas that created our digital world.

The ownership of ideas ought to be respected. Our commercial well-being, both personal and general, rests on this. Piracy, cracking, swapping and sharing, and the other cute words that we use to hide behind when we steal may not have brought our engines of industry to a halt yet, but the harm can be felt. We designers know this because it is from people like us that this theft occurs. And we fail to be placated when our clients make a slight change and then claim that, since the idea is no longer the same, the ownership isn’t either.

There is a final reason that we might experience difficulty in getting paid and, in a way, it encompasses the other two as well. And that is that there are a lot of people in business who are, quite simply, assholes. But that’s another topic.

Paul Epp is professor at OCAD University and chair of its Industrial Design Department.