I asked folks on Twitter to define design in one tweet. From sound designers, to graphic and visual designers, to lighting designers, to cinematographers, to set designers, to writers, to developers, here’s what they said:

“Design is reconciling conflicting requirements into a product’s integrated structure and behavior” art vs engineering — @Pen_Bird

Design is telling a story through the shaping of sensation. — @nickkeenan

Design (theatre): Discovering and realizing the physical context of the story. — @Photosphere

The act of thinking, planning, and determining prior to an action, so that future interaction can be expected. — @SunriseDesign

Design is trial and error, mixed with a little luck. The whole process is a lot of “damn, I didn’t get it the first time.” — @lrenhrda

Theatre-Creation of play’s visual &aural environs informed by text & production conceit, rendered thru the art of stagecraft — @batfishlighting

Or to incl concerts: Manipulation of visual presentation of performance for purpose of underlining the impact of the piece. — @batfishlighting

The process of developing efficient, useable, appealing, and appropriate aesthetic choices. — @Jason_Waggoner

Realizing the world of a story, whether realistic or abstract. — @dloehr

Designing is deciding. — @coreylubo

Design is the fusion of creativity and innovation; the systematic art of redefining ideas, rearranging dreams into reality. — @Devcab_Connor

Design: Facilitate Understanding & Relevance. — @TheClayton

Design is pragmatic art. — @ scottmessinger

Finally, here’s my attempt:

1. Walk into the matrix. Bring a sleeping bag. 2. Emerge holding the eigenvectors. 3. Sculpt to taste. 4. Test. 5. Go to 1.

How do you define design?

I dig that.

Anyway, here’s the page for our conversation:

The competitive advantage of hiring artists, A conversation with Chris Ashworth

Despite the specificity of the title, we hit a bunch of topics in that hour of chatting. Listen in and hear me:

• railing against sick days
• pleading with businesses to question the rules of their workplace
• ranting about pricing your work
• wondering whether your art can be better instead of cheaper
• hollering “F permission”

and

• making my case for how Star Trek, positronic brains, human evolution and racism all relate to hiring.

I’m only really here to share one tip. Kinda like a stock tip, I guess. It’s a tip I am increasingly convinced should be seriously considered by a variety of business owners in America.

The tip is this:

Hire artists.

No, wait, hold on. It’s not that simple. Actually, it sort of IS that simple, but not in the way you’re thinking. You need to understand what I’m proposing here, and to understand what I’m proposing, you need to understand the following story.

The Story

In March 2010, I was in trouble. A year previously, I had released the second version of my product, QLab 2. As a product, it succeeded. It brought new customers. Many new customers. Too many new customers.

In 2008, I sent about 600 QLab support emails.

In 2009, I conservatively estimate that I sent 6000. (But that’s really low-balling it.)

There were days I’d wake up in the morning, start answering emails at 6 am, write responses until 6 pm, take a break for dinner, answer a few more that night, and go to bed with more email in the inbox than when I’d started.

Serious problem. Seriously AWESOME problem, but, you know, still a problem. I needed help.

Now, I already had some help. Meet Sean:

Hi Sean! Sean’s an awesome dude. He was a friend from college. He is an OS X developer too. The summer before, Sean and I had joined our two companies together. Aside from helping with the code, he had already become an invaluable help in answering all those emails in the months leading up to March 2010.

But it wasn’t enough. I needed another person. The time had finally come to, you know, hire someone. Not just join forces with a friend, but flat-out, does-this-mean-I’m-an-adult-now? hire someone.

Meet Luckydave

Hi Luckydave! Luckydave, in case you hadn’t noticed, goes by the name “luckydave”. In March 2010, Luckydave had already been a QLab user for years. He is a working video designer in New York. A really good one. But more than just a user, Luckydave had been a champion. And by “champion” I mean he sold our product harder than we did. Luckydave wrote posts to the QLab mailing lists that rivaled ours in their detail and helpfulness. Luckydave acted like it was his personal mission to convert the world’s theaters to QLab. Luckydave was known to announce that he’d “drunk the QLab koolaid”. Luckydave knew details about how video codecs work “in the field” in ways that we simply did not know. Because we were not in the field.

Luckydave was, in short, awesome. And I, it will not surprise you one bit to know, wanted him on our team.

What I Did

I offered Luckydave a job.

Surprise!

Well, yeah, big deal. But here’s the twist:

I offered Luckydave a job based on the needs of his life as an artist.

First, I told him we wanted him on the team. Then, I told him we would create the job based on what would work for both of us. We talked it out, and we constructed a position specifically for him, with these properties:

• He can sign up to “work support” in units as small as a single day, or as large as a full month.
• He only needs to tell me one day in advance if he’s working the next day.
• He can work the hours that fit his schedule for that day.
• When he is not working for Figure 53, he can do whatever the hell he wants. Including go make art. For a week. Or a month. Or whatever the gig requires.

We created this framework together, and then I asked LD what it would take to make this structure worth his time. He replied, “When I have been the least worried about money, I have been making X dollars a month.”

I could afford X dollars a month. I said yes.

I wrote down the above terms, put them at the end of the legal-speak from the lawyers, we signed it, and it was done.

This all happened at the end of March 2010.

What Happened Next

When someone writes to support@figure53.com, our help desk software tracks how long it takes us to respond. Now, one thing you need to appreciate is that we have customers all over the world. We get questions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There is no such thing as “standard business hours” for us. Art doesn’t take a vacation. If someone writes me a question at 10 PM, and I wake up at 7 AM to answer it, that person has waited over 500 minutes to get that answer. When your customers are in Australia and you’re in Maryland, that’s a real wait.

Keep that in mind, and then take a look at this graph of our time-to-first-response for the past 9 months:

There are at least two things here worth noting.

Number one: Since joining us at the end of March, Luckydave has helped us pull down our overall response times significantly.

Number two: Those little green bars for the last few months? Those show that our median time-to-first-response since adding Luckydave to the team has been around 20 minutes.

20 minutes. 7 days a week. 24 hours a day.

NOTE TO SKIMMERS: HERE IS WHERE SHIT GETS REAL

So far the story has been pretty good. I found a wonderful teammate. We made a job for him. It measurably helped the company. Life is good.

But I’m hiding one stunning fact from you, and it is this:

Barely a few weeks into Luckydave’s new job with Figure 53, he got a call.

A call from a temp agency. The temp agency he used in the past, to fill his free time between gigs.

Because, you know, that’s what working artists usually have to do. It’s hard to make a complete living in the arts.

And yet people do it. People like Luckydave, who are passionate about what they make, they do it. They temp if they must, but they do it. Because that is the drive of these people. They care. They care very, very much.

And so they temp. And so Luckydave temped. And Luckydave temped for a financial agency in New York. And he learned to operate financial…software of some kind. I’ve never fully understood what. But something tricky to use. Something important to fancy financy-type people.

And Luckydave, it turns out, is really fucking good at this financial software.

Not just a little good. Best-in-the-world good. He is fast. He is efficient. He is really. Fucking. Good.

Which? Is not actually so surprising! Luckydave is the kind of guy that uses QLab like a musical instrument. I couldn’t keep up with him if I tried. He makes things in QLab I didn’t even know were possible. AND I WROTE IT.

So the temp agency calls to say, weeks after Luckydave accepted my offer, that by golly, the financial company would like to hire him to drive THEIR software. Full-time.

With a starting salary of 80,000 dollars a year.

Kapow.

Ka.

Pow.

Now it is not my business to share what Figure 53 is paying Luckdyave, but I will tell you this: it is not 80,000 dollars a year. Not, I am afraid to say, even close. I wish it were. But we are not fancy financy-type people, and we don’t have that kind of cash at the moment.

So by all rights, that graph up there? That graph up there should have started going back up in May.

But I note to you that it did not.

I note to you that Luckydave thought over that offer for a few minutes, and then?

He said no.

I want you to let that soak in for a second. I’ll wait.

{he waits}

Pretty crazy, huh.

Well, pretty crazy if you just focus on the money. But for many (all?) of the best people in the world, money stops mattering once you have enough to not worry about it.

Is 80,000 dollars enough for Luckydave to give up his life as an artist? Turns out, no. Turns out, robbing him of his life’s passion costs more than that. Turns out, I can’t afford to pay him nearly so much, but I can support him as a creative human being who doesn’t fit in a 9-to-5 structure. Turns out, what I get for that support is one of the most dedicated, cheerful, creative, committed, hard-working teammates I could possibly ask for. Turns out, his battery is charged by being him more than it is by counting dollars.

So here’s the thing, here is my tip, and here is what I want the business owners of America to think about very hard:

Artists, as a species, are amazing people. And America, as a general rule, does not fully get this. Show me a good artist and I will show you a highly educated, highly creative, highly passionate, highly driven human being. If they’re a performing artist, I will show you someone who breathes teamwork. I will show you someone who eats healthy critiques for breakfast and grows an inch that day because of it. I will show you a communicator, and a thinker.

I will show you someone you want to hire.

And all you have to do, is not destroy the whole reason you want to hire them.

All you have to do, in short, is create jobs built for artists. The result? Instant competitive advantage.

I think this is a big deal.

I’m sorry it took me so long to get to the point here, but I didn’t know how to do it any more compactly and get the depth of this point across.

I think this is a really big deal. I think the failure to employ artists is an inefficiency in the system. I think it doesn’t need to be this way. I think there’s no reason we can’t collectively set up the same kind of win-win situations that Figure 53 found with Luckydave. I think we should do it.

I’m going to continue working to build my little company. With luck, and work, and grace from the unknown, we’re going to keep making things, and grow enough to make things we couldn’t make before. It won’t be about getting big, but it will be about getting big enough, and every person will count. I don’t have a ton of money to make this happen. But I have enough money, and I have the good sense to give people things more valuable than money.

My tip to you is that you, too, have things more valuable than money. All you have to do is be smart enough and willing enough to give them.

1. Beware the justice of Nature.
2. Understand that there can be no successful human economy apart from Nature or in defiance of Nature.
3. Understand that no amount of education can overcome the innate limits of human intelligence and responsibility. We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale.
4. In making things always bigger and more centralized, we make them both more vulnerable in themselves and more dangerous to everything else. Learn, therefore, to prefer small-scale elegance and generosity to large-scale greed, crudity, and glamour.
5. Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made.
6. Put the interest of the community first.
7. Love your neighbors–not the neighbors you pick out, but the ones you have.
8. Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us.
9. As far as you are able make your lives dependent upon your local place, neighborhood, and household–which thrive by care and generosity–and independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage.
10. Find work, if you can, that does no damage. Enjoy your work. Work well.

Discovered via Scott Walters.

That post ended with a screenshot of Baltimore’s trends, which included not a peep about the technology topics that were sweeping the rest of Twitter:

“Oh, Baltimore,” I thought. “It’s why I love you. With all this noise about your emerging tech scene, Tequila still ranks higher than iPhone 4.”

Well, Baltimore, honey, I take it all back. Twitter has been slandering you. Witness today’s trends for Baltimore:

There we are, like some surrealist painting frozen in time: Lady Gaga, Harry Connick, and a bottle of Tequila sit gathered ’round the table while clocks melt over the Washington monument.

It is, and it shall apparently always be, about that time.

See, at the moment the world of indie theater is having a great big-ol’ chew-it-up hash-it-out discussion about the pros and cons and wherefores and howtos of dynamic pricing.

I find this fascinating, and entirely worthwhile. But, aside from believing some version of dynamic pricing is probably a great idea, I don’t have any direct experience using it. So: can’t really comment.

Thing is, the general topic of “pricing” is something I do have a little bit of experience with, and all this talk of dynamic pricing has been getting me hot and bothered about a related subject which has been festering on my blogging back burner for months.

Well, on Friday Dan Granata made a comment on Twitter that made the pot boil over. Dan wrote:

So it’s been a few days, but the comment re: my theatre, “Let’s be clear, tickets are $18, this isn’t Broadway” is a depressing datapoint.

I asked:

Wait, what? Someone was complaining about an $18 ticket being too expensive?

To which Dan replied:

No – they were saying *because* it was $18, they respected us less. Because we charge so little, we must not be worth much.

I tried to clarify:

Ah. Then: depressing because of all the work that goes in to it, and the quality that isn’t being respected?

And Dan explained:

sort of. More that someone who saw the show (and liked it) would still use ticket price as a indicator of quality.

And also that it supports my long-held fear that a low ticket price may actually hurt your reputation, rather than up sales

Which was, it turns out, the precise moment that

My Pot Boileth Over

First off, let’s just set a ground rule here: you know your customers better than I do. (Or at least I hope you do.) If I say something here that feels clearly stupid, and seems to suggest that you should do something that would offend or abuse or exploit your customers, then the rule is: your gut trumps my bloviation.

But I do want to humbly relate a few things I’ve learned in setting a price on my own hard work. It may be instructive. It may not. But at least hear me out, because the way I think about pricing now is very different from the way I thought about pricing at the start. I think it’s useful to know how, at least in my case, things that seemed obvious from the beginning weren’t always true.

Dear indie software friends, dear indie theater friends, this is a letter to you both, from four years in.

First, a few datapoints.

I make a product called QLab. There have been two version of QLab so far.

QLab version 1 had an audio license priced at $49. It had a video license priced at $149. It was very popular. It won a fancy award. It was so successful, in fact, that I quit my day job to work on it full time.

When I released QLab version 2, however, I changed the pricing. To wit:

• QLab 2 has an audio license priced at $249.
• QLab 2 has an educational discount for the audio license: $199.
• QLab 2 has a new rental licensing scheme. It allows renting a license starting at $3/day, or $1/day for educational purposes.

The story I am telling today is about:

• Why I decided to change the pricing,
• What happened when I did, and
• Whether or not I regret it.

While I don’t want to be overly prescriptive here, I have enough evidence at this point to draw a few firm conclusions. We’ll get to them in a second. But first,

The curious case of the complaining customers.

I’m about to tell you a story which I can only really describe as “freaking weird on the face of it”.

It is the story of how my customers complained about my prices for QLab 1. Specifically, how they complained that those prices were

Too low.

I spend some time paying attention to what people are saying about my product. I check the mailing lists. I check the forums. I check the Twitter. And what I found in the days of QLab 1 was that, mixed in with the astonishing news that some people were buying their first Mac ever just so they could use QLab, was the equally astonishing news that some people were unwilling to buy QLab at all because it didn’t cost enough.

Even weirder, I started getting emails from people who did buy it, asking me to raise the price.

Whaaaa?

That’s freaking weird.

I know, right?

But actually… it’s not. And here’s why: my customers knew themselves. They knew themselves much, much better than I did. I had started down this QLab road unsure there was any destination at the end of it. The first steps were for fun, the next steps were for fun and curiosity, and the next steps were for fun, curiosity, and maybe a little extra spending money on the side.

Yet, for my customers, it was more than that. I’d made something that people wanted to be part of their lives. They looked at my prices, and they knew: if this guy doesn’t raise his prices, he’s not going to be around long. They saw this problem clearly, and they saw it long before I did. So they told me.

And you know what? They were right. It took me a while, but eventually I realized they were right. Because at first, hey, I was actually doing pretty well for myself. I quit my job! I was working for myself! I was living the dream! I’d tell my wife at dinner the sales for the day and she’d look at me astonished and say “how many sound designers can there possibly be?” and I’d say, with a hint of hysterical terror in my voice, “I don’t know! Maybe that was the last one! Ha! HAHAHAHHAHAHOHGODOHGODPLEASELETMESELLANOTHERCOPY” But they kept coming! Eventually I managed to even view each sale not with terror, but merely with mild discomfort. Because they kept coming! Surely probability was on my side!

And yet… each sale also meant a new person in our community. New people in the community brought wonderful energy, wonderful stories, and lots of new questions, new requests, and new emails in my inbox every morning. I loved it! But I’m only one guy! And I was running a company that could only afford to be one guy!

And my customers knew it. And eventually, even I knew it. Which brings me to

What happened next.

Or

Probably the most anxious 9 months of my life to date.

Wow, was it really nine months? Let’s see, I quit my job in April, and I released QLab 2 the following January. Ha! Nice! Symbolism, that was a perfect place to step in. Thanks for that.

What did I do in that nine months? I rewrote my product, and I reexamined my company. Both needed adjustments. The product would become QLab 2. The company would become…what, exactly?

I said in my illustrated history of QLab that I was “literally shaking” when I pressed the send button on the email that announced QLab 2. It’s true; I was.

Whatever happened next was essentially going to determine the future of me and my company. Would people like the product? Would they be willing to support it at the new prices? (The audio license had increased in price by 500%! That’s not a little bump!) Would I be able to make a real company, that could support real employees for the real long term? It had been nine months of hundreds of hours of coding, testing, designing, tweaking, second-guessing, hair-pulling work. And all nine months of it came down to pressing that one button. You’d shake too.

Well, here’s what happened:

<insert stunned silence here>

A fluke? Turns out: no. Here’s the bigger picture:

And here’s the breakdown by count, gross, and license type:

So. What to make of this? The graphs tell part of the story, but what was going on at the human level? Was I fielding outraged emails from customers that could no longer afford my product? Did I raise my profits by turning away large swaths of the community I’d worked so hard to find? When I actually did raise my prices, did everyone, in short, freak the hell out?

To my astonishment, the answer was

No.

Really. It really was.

People did not get angry. I can count on one hand the number of angry emails or Twitter messages I’ve seen about QLab’s price. And for each of those angry messages? I reached out. We talked. I listened to what was making them angry, and we talked about it. And not one of those people are angry anymore.

People did not get turned away. I know of a single customer that turned away because of the price. One. And while maybe there are people who turned away and didn’t tell me, I will remind you that we are selling more licenses. And those licenses are being sold, as far as I can tell, to the same kinds of people as before. How? How could I possibly raise my prices by 500% and not turn people away? Because, remember, I didn’t just raise our prices. I rebuilt our entire pricing structure. I still had the free version. It was still really powerful. I added the rentals. They’re even more powerful, but they’re also really cheap for the situations where it’s most justifiable that QLab should be really cheap. And I added the educational discounts on everything. And, at the end of the day, there was me, a human being who cares and who really wants people to use my software. If someone reaches out to me, we talk. We figure something out. And only once did it get that far and reach an impasse.

In short: I fixed my broken prices, and everyone won.

Or, to put it a different way: Pricing is a single variable in a multiverse of important variables. In this complicated universe of ours, it’s rare that myopically optimizing one variable does the universe any good.

Or, to put it a third way: Pricing reminds us that

There is. No. Spoon.

There’s this single moment in time when money changes hands for a product or service. That’s an unusual moment, because at that moment the product, in some sense, has a real, definable “price”. But before and after that moment the value of whatever is being purchased is a probabilistic blur where reality, emotion, and psychology mix in strange ways.

Each person who buys your software, your theater ticket, your whatever, will assign their own value to the thing. In a perfect world you would charge each person exactly how much they value your software, your theater ticket, or your whatever. But you can’t do that — not just because it will be different for different people but because it will even be different for the same people, depending on when and how you ask them.

By setting a price, you are basically taking a stab or three into a probabilistic soup. We all know there’s no cosmic ledger of “correct” prices. We all know we’re taking a stab. But what we don’t always fully consider — or, at least, what I didn’t fully consider — is how deeply

Psychology trumps.

There is disturbing anecdotal evidence of this in the form of people who spend money they don’t have. But the best evidence I have from personal experience can be summed up in two words: Educational. Discount.

Recall that above I told you the initial price of a QLab audio license was 49 dollars. That was the flat rate. That was the take-it-or-leave-it. That was the here’s-the-best-I-can-do.

And you know wanna know something? You wanna know what question I fielded most often? Any guesses? It was:

“Do you have an educational discount?”

On a 49 dollar license! For a piece of software that, it may also interest you to know, was offering a genuine and viable alternative to a product that, at the time, cost around — wait for it! — 1000 bucks!

Now fast forward to version 2. The price of the audio license has gone from 49 dollars to 249 dollars. But, knowing my most common question about version 1, I also add an educational price: 199 dollars. Or, to put it another way, the new discounted price is 400% greater than the old standard price.

And now? Now we sell more of these than we ever did with the standard price of version 1! Does the new rental license have something to do with this? Probably. It certainly gives a fantastic alternate discount for those who have an exceptionally tight budget.

But I’m telling you that I used to get the “educational discount” question on almost every single license I sold to an educational institution. Now, I have an educational discount, and it’s 400% more expensive than the old non-discounted version, and I have never once received a request for an additional discount!

Psychology is weird!

But also: important to respect!

Alright, let’s bring this home.

Here’s my thing.

You care about your customer. You’re on their team, and they are also on your team. That’s an important relationship. My goal here is not to abuse or break that relationship, but if anything to strengthen it. The right price is the one that’s fair to both of you, and if you’re genuinely on each others’ team, you can stand up for this fact without shame or greed.

When you’re starting out, you try to guess how your customers will value what you do. You’re probably going to be wrong, and you’re probably going to guess low. Because you’re a nice person. You want to make your work “accessible”.

Now, in my experience, there is such a thing as accessibility, but it has a bad psychological influence on you when you’re setting your base price. It skews you low. You’re new at this, you’re not sure what you do is worth money, you’re thinking of all those hypothetical customers who can’t afford more than X dollars for your product, whatever. Point is, here you are, you’ve just started out, you have no data, and you’re a nice person, so you tried to be fair, and accessible, and your price is really low.

Now, shooting low isn’t automatically a terrible way to start. You can always change your price, and it’s not so bad to come out of the gate humble instead of cocky. So the problem isn’t so much where you start, as it is,

What you do next

This is the tricky part, and this is the part I see my fellow young people flubbing.

You essentially have one data point. “This is what happens when I value my work at price X.” Maybe it even works okay. You’re selling a bunch of tickets at 15 bucks a pop. Sure, you’re living on egg noodles, but you’ve got young people coming to see your shows that couldn’t otherwise afford it. Well, maybe. You probably don’t actually have hard data to confirm that, but you’re pretty sure it’s true.

But what if it’s not?

Consider QLab for a second. Lucky for me, I wasn’t just a little ignorant about pricing, I was a lot ignorant. I priced my work so extremely low that my own customers knew I’d overdone it. I’m blessed with smart, professional customers, and they knew my market (i.e. themselves) way better than I did. They knew that in the long run I couldn’t survive on the prices I’d picked. They wanted me to survive. So they warned me: “Your prices are too low. You need to charge me more.”

You’re probably not as dumb as me.

So back to you, and your 15 dollar ticket. Or your 40 dollar piece of shareware. Whatever. The point is, you’re probably not as dumb as me. When you stabbed into the probabilistic soup of prices, you may have aimed better, and gotten a better number up front. If so, that may be a problem, because the warning signs may be less obvious. Maybe your patron thinks to themselves “huh, 15 bucks, that’s a really great price”. And silently enjoys your show. For 10 bucks less than their internal value-ometer was inclined to suggest.

And now, week by week, month by month, where does that extra 10 dollars go? Well, if you never needed it in the first place, good on you; you’re not greedy. A little odd that you’re willing to value yourself less than your customers, but that’s your prerogative.

But if you DO need that extra 10 dollars, then the common wisdom is that it’s going to come out of your budget. Sure, that’s probably true. That’s probably partly where it comes from. But I suspect that maybe only 7 bucks of that really actually comes out of your budget.

I suspect that the rest of it probably comes bleeding out of you.

And that’s a problem.

And, tragically, it may not even need to be a problem. And you don’t even know it.

You’re worth it.

You’re on the same team as your customer. You know that. They know that.

By all means, make your work accessible. But be careful about what you think that means, and how you choose to do it.

Your customer thinks you’re worth it. For the sake of you both, act like you are.

Or, rather, we basically came to the same conclusion as Steve Jobs.

Via Engadget:

Walt: Is the tablet going to replace the laptop? Tell me what you think about where it’s going?

Steve: You know… (long pause). I’m trying to think of a good analogy. When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy. The PC has taken us a long way. They were amazing. But it changes, vested interests are going to change. And I think we’ve embarked on that change. Is it the iPad? Who knows? Will it be next year or five years…

Walt: Well you don’t think it will be next year?

Steve: Well… who knows?