I’m at the HOW Design Conference in Boston for the first part of this week, thanks to the generous support of my employers, who like to send me on little adventures like this every now and then so that I can keep myself sharp, learn new things that might benefit our company, and (possibly most importantly) not go nuts and kill everyone in the office.

One of the most interesting parts of the HOW Conference is, for me, the opportunity to be around thousands of other designers. Generally speaking when someone says "I’m a designer" there’s a certain expectation of creative ability–the casual observer naturally wants to assign the designer some preternatural ability to ooze creative juices nonstop.

To some extent this is true; I’d certainly expect the folks at a conference of this sort to be the type that are always questioning everything around them and looking at things in new and different ways. But in all honesty, designers can be quite lazy, just as employees in virtually any other field can be (witness highway construction projects wherein one guy is in a hole doing something and seven other guys are standing around said hole, discussing it). And a couple of things that I’ve seen so far from my fellow attendees have dismayed me.

On my way to this morning’s first session, I had to walk from my hotel (the Westin Copley Place) through a series of interconnected shopping plazas to the Convention Center. I passed at least two Starbucks locations, an Au Bon Pain, two other hotels, a food court, and a Dunkin’ Donuts, and there were certainly other similar locations in the general vicinity that I’m not even aware of. Alarmingly, the longest lines were at the two Starbucks locations–the lines trailed out the doors and into the promenade outside.

I can just hear the critics now: "It was 9 in the morning. Of course people are going to go to Starbucks. They wanted coffee." Yes, they wanted coffee, and so did I–but I pre-ordered breakfast last night and had an entire pot brought up from room service 15 minutes after I was out of bed. If ordering room service is too rich for someone’s blood, there were plenty of other options in the general vicinity of the Convention Center… and yet, the vast majority of the coffee-buying designers chose to go to Starbucks.

Don’t read this as an anti-corporate, anti-Starbucks tirade; I have a lot of respect for the company and am in awe of how big they’ve gotten in such a relatively short period of time. The point here is that multitudes of designers –people who are paid to think outside the box–all succumbed to groupthink. They saw a line, the primeval herd mentality deep in their DNA kicked in, and they stood in it, thinking nothing more than "coffee." Yes, it’s true that some of these folks may have wanted something that they could only get at Starbucks, and others may not have known that there were other options³³, but by and large I’d bet that most people in the line didn’t think about it at all. Groupthink, herd mentality.

The other example: The bulk of our presentations are being held in a large auditorium. There are doors on either side of the stage, with one set of doors arbitrarily being used as the ‘primary’ entrance. There’s no real advantage or disadvantage of using one entrance over the other, as you can easily circle the auditorium from the outside and reach the other side. There are also chairs spanning the entire width of the auditorium, with seats on the left side of the stage just as good as seats on the right side of the stage–there is literally no difference in visibility.

And yet, the vast majority (I’d say easily 90%, if not more) of the people attending sessions in this auditorium
all funnel through the bottleneck of the main entrance and then immediately sit down in the chairs closest to the doors . This behavior utterly baffles me, as my instinct is to avoid the crowd altogether and to move to an empty area of the auditorium where I can have a clearer view of the presenter as well as a more unobstructed path to the alternate exit. It’s as if the majority of the people in the room don’t realize that they’re succumbing to a mob mentality. Again–aren’t these supposed to be some of the most creative people around?

Yes, it would be idiotic to assume that someone would think, "Instead of walking into the primary entrance, I’ll charter a helicopter, land on the roof, and rappel down into the auditorium," or "I’m going to vanish myself and then reappear in the auditorium in a puff of smoke." Obviously such entrances would be unrealistic (not to mention expensive), but that’s not the point; the act of thinking about such alternate entrance (and exit) strategies is what’s important.

Perhaps someone would be right in pointing out that these are just basic subconscious human behaviors, and to a certain extent that’s true. My point is this: Creative professionals have an obligation to force themselves to try and break their psychological programming, defy conventions and create solutions to problems that other people can’t see. I think it’s safe to say that the best designers are probably the ones who are always coming up with these very answers, even in their real day-to-day lives and not just when they’re putting pen to paper or working in Photoshop.3

1. This is no excuse in my mind. No one is going to stop someone from exploring the surrounding areas, especially in an unfamiliar city in the United States.333

3