Expressible in a single sentence

From an interview with Jonathan Harris

Then I had a mentor in Italy when I was working at Fabrica. Sadly, he died a couple of years ago. He was a tall British man with very big ears and very big feet, and his name was Andy Cameron. He taught me a number of things, but there’s one lesson in particular that really stuck with me. When I’d been at Fabrica for about three weeks, I’d been compiling numerous ideas for projects in my notebooks. I was excited to meet with Andy, to tell him about all of these ideas, and to get his feedback. I told him my ideas for about 15 minutes, but he didn’t say much. When I asked him what he thought, he replied: “Jonathan, when you’re thinking of a new idea, ask yourself if it’s something the Italian everyman could understand.” I asked him what he meant. He said, “You know those old Italian men who gather on Sundays in Piazza Signori in Treviso, wearing their top hats and suits? If you can go up to one of those men and, in your bad Italian, communicate your idea—and if he can understand your idea, respond to it, and think it’s interesting—then you’ve almost certainly hit on something strong and universal. If you can’t do that, then you may have hit on something strong and universal, but your chances are a little bit lower.”

That simple insight from Andy caused me to rethink how I was approaching everything. From that point on, I tried to reframe what I wanted to do in less complicated ways. A lot of the ideas I had been proposing to him had been too clever for their own good: they were “inside baseball” ideas. Since then, every project I’ve worked on has been expressible in a single sentence. The sentence is typically something that emerges early in the process. For instance, with We Feel Fine, the sentence was: “A search engine for human emotions.” With 10 x 10, it was: “Hourly snapshots of life on earth.” With Cowbird: “A public library of human experience.”

Even though the design process can take months or years and lead me down many different pathways, once that sentence is found, it is sacred and shouldn’t be changed. Every design solution I come up with has to be checked against that sentence to see if it’s consistent: if it isn’t, I should throw it away. Those sentences are like the soul of each project. That way, when one of those Italian guys walks up and asks, (in an Italian accent)“What are you working on?” I can say, “I’m building a public library of human experience!” (laughing)Hopefully he would reply, “Ah! It’s beautiful! It’s lovely!” I think it’s a helpful rule, especially for young designers just starting out.