As an individual, it’s always been hard for me to accept being called ‘well-rounded’ as a compliment.  Besides just its potential innuendo of rotund or portly, it can also mean that an individual lacks focus, or is unable to engage a topic past superficial strata.   In a family that valued specialisation (and professions that required it), it was hard for me to find my niche in any one corner.

Throughout college, this meant that my academic interests fluttered from building to building, never finding rest in any department.  My environmental studies professors found me too hard and logical; relying on definitions, proofs and formulas to prove ethical dilemmas.  My math professors found me too soft and indecisive, seeing multifarious routes when one would suffice. And of course, nothing angered them more than ethical arguments that began “but this way would also…”  (an aside: My random-interest professors—art, languages, economics—found me flat out bizarre for loving both the indecisiveness in environmental studies and concreteness of math.  Then again, they never rejected my “no, you can’t recycle that” and/or computational help on syllabus grade breakdowns that didn’t quite add to 100%.)

In a business, being ‘well-rounded’ carries similar connotations.  Consumers demand, in most vocations, that businesses can complete one simple task—plumbers damn well know how to plumb, and gardeners ought to know how to wield a spade.  Yet no one asks a plumber to nanny.  And certainly, no one would ask Fran Drescher to plumb.   The exception to this rule of course is in the world of design.

To call oneself a ‘designer’ leaves much to be explained—fashion, graphic, web, interactive, textile, industrial, interior, exterior, landscaping, zen and Buddhist garden, flower float, colour, cake, visual display, packaging, jewellery… you get the point.  Each job presents its own clogs and requires its snaky tools, but yet somehow to those living outside of the design world, they’re all a bit interchangeable.  You might ask your interior designer friend to fix your wedding dress because he/she is handy with a sewing machine.  Your artist friend owns Adobe Creative Suite, so maybe he/she can throw a website together for your neighbour who owns a food cart.

And since this happens more than not, the creative world becomes saturated with interior-exterior-designers SLASH photographers, graphic designer SLASH filmmakers, jewellery artists SLASH muralists SLASH graphic designers.  We’re all double- and triple-dipping our hands in each other’s jars, eager to help the left-brained half of the world add a bit of colour to their otherwise monochromatic, fluorescently-lit existences.

All of these individuals become diluted versions of one another; trying hard to identify themselves amongst a sea of well-rounded buoys. Some certainly much more talented than others; those less talented hoping that the ambiguity of it all will mask their ambivalence.  Struggling to float, these individuals form collectives (professionally known as “design studios” ) which are equally, if not more vague than the employees who comprise it.  Design studios that create websites, clothing, installations, cakes.  Anything peripheral becomes territorial with the simple question of, “hey, do you know how to…” quantified by a “because I need a…”  Uncertainty like this muddles the market, and confuses the general public on how (and why) to quantify design both monetarily and emotionally.

In this, we lose the dedicated few brave enough (myself not included) to define themselves by one term alone—furniture designers, graphic designers and all of those terms that make the obsolete phone book useful.  Individuals with enough wherewithall and restraint to pick and refine. I commend the individuals strong enough to sacrifice throwaway hobbies for their isolated passion.  Please continue to build your individual talents; one day I’m going to recruit you to make the fattest—I mean, most well-rounded—design group out there.  No cakes, though.  I’ll leave that to Duff, Geoff and crew.