Living in the Overlap

Steve Portigal

Portigal Consulting | steve@portigal.com

September + October 2008

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Here’s a bunch of stuff I haven’t tried: “Project Runway,” “High School Musical,” “American Pie” movies, robot wars, molecular gastronomy, Halo 3, “Dancing With the Stars,” “Frisky Dingo,” sudoku, biopics, “House,” “Desperate Housewives,” Portishead, Fifty Cent, Dane Cook, The Da Vinci Code, The Life of Pi, Marley & Me, The Lovely Bones, Augusten Burroughs, and Mitch Albom. I’m mildly curious about some; intensely disinterested about others. A lot of it might make a “sophisticated” individual uncomfortable. But my profession is identifying and establishing the connections between people, culture, brands, stories, and products, and that means it’s absolutely crucial that I know a little bit about all sorts of stuff that I may personally regard as crap.

It’s become increasingly in vogue to point to our own escalated sophistication by distancing ourselves from that which we don’t consume. By cobrand-ing myself with “The Wire,” “Deadwood,” Richard K. Morgan, “This American Life,” and Werner Herzog I can display important information about my ideals and aspirations (and I can then let my friends know all about my refined sensibili-ties, through the Friends and Community feature at Netflix). And while we see Dutch graphic designer Wim Crouwel explain to us in the film “Helvetica”

that he is a modernist and that his life is about being surrounded by modernism, from typefaces to furniture, I believe strongly that those of us who make things for other people need to embrace the existence of the “other.” Whether it’s post-modernism or pop culture, we need to consider the good, the bad, and the terrifying aspects of those others.

Pop culture is a rich source of information that can often be crucial for our work. When the public begin to compare and contrast the voting for “American Idol” with voting for the American president, that’s something we want to pay attention to. Dismissing this cultural data by sniffing “I don’t watch ‘American Idol’” isn’t a relevant response for designers, ethnographers, marketers, and other producers of goods and services.

To correct this, I’d recommend that everyone rush out right now and read Chuck Klosterman’s entertaining and provocative 2003 book, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. He’s got a wonderful ability to think deeply and communicate simply about intricate and previously unexamined aspects of popular culture. And while his topics (tribute bands, breakfast cereal, Internet porn, and the rest) are seemingly trivial, he finds deep cultural insight using those top-

ics as a starting point.

This discussion of interests— striking a balance between what we like deeply and what we broadly know about— mirrors another discussion about skills. Even trying to identify with a particular community in the larger umbrella of interactions can be uncomfortable. IDEO has publicized its desire to hire only “T-shaped people” with broad skills that can be applied to multiple projects but deep expertise in at least one discipline. More than a decade ago I attended a lecture on innovation by technology forecaster Paul Saffo, in which he encouraged us to approach problems, and our own careers, with the soul of generalist and the heart of a specialist. Saffo’s framework captures the messiness of the relationship between the general and special. For a few years I’ve been referring to this space as the “Overlap”; things that are not limited to one or the other but that reside in both.

Early in my career I struggled to market myself to colleagues and prospective employers as a generalist without a specialty, facing questions like “Are you a graphic designer? Are you a programmer? Are you a usability tester?” Many years later I have to fight off the specialties assigned to me. At a prominent ethnography conference in 2005, I was introduced to