The Whirlpool and the River

This is Part 3 of a Design Story from Katie Robertson and Diane Tamblyn. You can start with Part 1 here.

Part 3: The Whirlpool and the River

Jeff:

The two of you have worked together for a long time. What is your partnership like as designers?

Katie:              

I’m prone to acting kind of quickly, and sometimes I think I could benefit from not acting so quickly. I get excited and I start moving right away. I feel like I’m a racehorse, I came out like that in life. My mother says I was born and got up and ran around the room. In contrast, Diane holds things for a long time. The face she’s making right now, that’s a holding face [laughs]. There’s a readiness that she needs to have before she will move ahead, and because of that, I usually end up seeing something in a fuller way and realizing that we have more options than I thought, or maybe I need to look at it a different way.

Diane:              

It balances beautifully, because when I’m saying, “Let’s stir a little bit more,” there’s actually movement forward so that we can get out of the gate and not just keep the whirlpool going. Instead of just going deeper, it’s also moving, like a river. It’s a very nice balance that way.

Jeff:               

You often talk about the cycle of flare and focus — sometimes stopping and circling back and considering lots of possibilities, but other times making a decision and blazing forward without judgment — which creates possibilities that you might not have come up with otherwise. It sounds like in a way, you’ve distributed that between the two of you.

Katie:              

When we need to be moving, I can push and Diane is willing to move, and from Diane I’ve learned a lot by stopping, and realizing that we don’t have to do everything right away. There’s better work, I think, that comes out of it.

Diane:              

I think all of that is possible because there’s a level of trust in the relationship and in the collaboration, and we’ve also now been willing to take more risks. Being able to take big enough risks and trust the process leads us to places that we would not have been able to go alone. I think we’ve gotten better at living with the ambiguity of not knowing and I think we’ve gotten braver. Each project has brought a new layer of, “I think we can try this without knowing this piece or this piece, because we understand this other piece, so let’s go.”

We’ve been having a lot of fun expanding the discovery process at the beginning of a project and letting that really be fully explored before we move on to the next stage.

Katie:              

That discovery part of the design process, I would say, is one of my favorite parts and also the most challenging with people that we work with because human beings don’t like to wait.

Diane:              

We find that educators in particular don’t have a lot of experience holding possibilities and not moving forward right away, for themselves or their students.

Katie:              

The culture doesn’t support it.

Diane:              

It’s a discipline. It’s a way of being that you can really build and develop. It’s not just who I am. I might have a proclivity to behave in that manner but I think it’s really something that is developed over time.

Jeff:               

You have to trust that your students can be in that whirlpool and that you’re not wasting their time, that they have agency. You don’t have to fill their minds with your talk all the time.

Katie:              

Two students that I have in another class said, “Don’t you teach the arts class? Can we come talk to you about a project?” And so they came into my office. They want to engage the students at the county’s juvenile detention center. They asked me, “What should we do with them? How do we get them interested?” And I realized, “Wait a minute, why are you talking to me? You should go talk to them.”

Jeff:               

Go and actually figure out what they need.

Diane:              

But if you really get down in the weeds about what it takes to do that, it’s not easy. How do we build environments, social and physical environments where people have practiced doing that? Practiced sitting with another person, having the awkward silences, giving the person time to talk and being willing to go in there and develop a little bit of a relationship, those very subtle and important moves that allow a person to come into relationship with you so you can get the information that you need. Otherwise, you’re just living on the surface. So it takes an incredible amount of time.

Katie:              

Yes, even when we’re trying to design something together as colleagues, we can be the worst with one another, assuming that we know what the other person needs. I think we have to peel back some of established norms and ways of trying to get information from people, and create better habits and mindsets.