On administration as art
Design operations, consulting, OKRs—why they're works of art, and why the best admins are artists in disguise.
Hi there — if you’re new here, welcome! We’ve likely met or worked in the past. I’m sending along this article I wrote in case you like it and want to stay tuned. These articles cover my work as a community strategist and all the musings that come with it. xx
Last week, I had the privilege to attend Rosenfeld Media’s 2022 DesignOps Summit. It was room after room of strategic thinkers, systems scalers, design stewards, and earnest—honest!—connection. It was a virtual event done right: larger group sessions by Kate Stern, Rachel Radway, Alla Weinberg, Jon Fukuda, Candace Meyers, Jose Coronado and more discussed the power of designing for neurodivergence, scaling teams from 50 to 5,000, and critical lessons when managing expectations.
Their talks threaded together group sessions and breakout rooms where I spoke about my own work at DSCS in front of Chief of Staffs and Design Operations Managers. Live Miro boards tracked and organized who we were, where we were, and why we were there. I genuinely left feeling more empowered about my work than I have after leaving an art conference, a string of gallery openings, or even the Venice Biennale.
So what did a group of design systems thinkers do better than artists and curators? They treated it like a work of art.
“Administrative” work from operations to event planning is not separate from art, but is art. By widening our definitions of art and artistry, I believe we can unlock untapped agency, confidence, and creativity across disciplines.
Wait… what’s design operations?
Design operations is a relatively new field (think past ten-ish years) that works across people, practices, and platforms to build more efficient and effective design teams. Design Ops practitioners assess the “20,000-foot view” when teams of 20, 50, or 5,000 are designing the visual, creative, and speculative components of companies from Squarespace to H-E-B to Meta to Soundcloud. They work alongside existing product/project managers, UX/UI designers, and heads of design, thinking critically about how to make teams:
Happier (can the onboarding process better define roles and responsibilities so we stop arguing over who does what?),
Better (can we train everyone to use the same workflow management system so designers can switch into new teams and projects with ease?), and
More effective (can each teams’ objectives and key results align quarterly so we have accurate, comparable benchmarks for success and areas to improve?)
Now stay with me: if we were to simply switch our language from “designers” to “artists,” we can quickly see how this role would be a game changer for artist’s studios, museum design teams, and nonprofit program managers. A role dedicated to ironing out kinks in communication, responsibility, onboarding, and tooling? Sounds a lot like what I and a lot of other consultants do. We just don’t have the language for it (yet).
So how is it art?
I had a few conversations this year that come to mind when considering administration and operations as art. Tony Patrick is an artist, writer, and worldbuilder. A part of his practice brings together groups of intergenerational thinkers, planners, artists, designers, architects, and activists to imagine speculative futures. Collectively, they plan a path to get to their shared future with value frameworks, paintings, draft policies, comics, and virtual games. Tony does this because he firmly believes in an artist’ ability to conjure the tone, texture, and intention of the future:
Sounds like artists build the path forward for communities, assistants, and collaborators to be happier, better, and more efficient at getting to their vision of the future. Better yet, it sounds like Tony does the upfront administrative and operational work to make it happen—it’s just in a collective capacity as opposed to a corporate one.
Artist Sharon Loudon also said a similar thing when discussing her administrative work as the Artistic Director to the Chautauqua Visual Arts residency with me. She argues being an artist these days is more about “how we think, how we live, and what we say:”
The definition of art—and artist—has long been extended to everything and anything. Just ask Piero Manzoni or Gavin Turk. Math is essential to art and design. Composting is performance art. Science can mimic painting. Lectures? Duh! Budgeting?? Duh!! So why stop at administration? Whether it’s an artist's brushstroke, a design op’s plan, or a coach’s advice, our work requires strategy, intention, planning, trial, and a lot of error. It takes creativity to move through our professional lives, personal relationships, and yes, our virtual summits.
Calling yourself an artist these days might simply mean you’re tuned into others, fluidly adapt to what the world may need, and eschew boxed in corporate training for expansive and empathetic thinking.
Limiting art to only what hangs on a wall or sits on a pedestal keeps it out of reach when it’s often what we reach for. It reminds me of Western museums and homes displaying African and Indigenous objects meant for daily or ceremonial use: they strip them of their original intent (to be used, passed down, and build community), only to sit idle for someone else to stare at. Keeping art from our admin is pretty Western, definitely colonial, and totally unproductive given the pretty convincing argument that creativity is the core engine of evolution. It might be why I often struggle at art Biennales—all look, no touch—but love an interactive summit.
It’s our role to claim
When we build our systems, tools, and techniques with creativity at their core, we save space for ingenuity, innovation, and inspiration. Take Melissa Wong and her work at Coherence Studio, Kim Robinson and his growth resource 3pts, or Izzy Dow and her writing for Upstate Update. I will be the first to argue their work, independent of its material output, are artworks in their own right that fit into their larger practices, just like Tony’s convenings, Sharon’s residency, and Rosenfeld’s summit. I think they’re artists. Hell, maybe we’re all artists. Forget a pedigree or an MFA: if what we creates gets people to look, to think, and to imagine something new, we’re artists—and good ones, too.
If you disagree, and think a more firm boundary should be placed between “artists” and “non-artists,” take a stab in the comments.
As a little treat, DSCS reader and compost clinician Cassie Marketos recommends The Human Argument: The Writings of Agnes Denes to continue the conversation. Maybe we all read it together?
Deep gratitude and thanks to Adeline Crites-Moore, Phill LoFaso, and the entire team at Rosenfeld for their generous scholarship to attend DesignOps Summit. Thank you to Soraya Haas and Vivian Iyamba for my first conversations about Design Ops. Also, shout out to Jose Coronado and Kate Stern’s work that I pull from and link to when defining design ops, and Cassie for the read through and book offering. And shout out to you, reader, for sticking with me and my work. It means the world.