I’m regularly struck by San Franciscan Tony Deifell’s idea for a worldwide community art project intended to answer the question “why do you do what you do?” (and not just because he presented it at Ignite Bay Area but because it includes crowdsourced combinations of motivation, images and ideas). Through Monday, respondents can join the likes of Gloria Steinem and Harvard Business School students in answering the easy (or incredibly challenging) question for a chance to be included in an exhibition on Burning Man’s prehistoric lake bed.
I won’t paraphrase Deifell’s reason for starting the project. In his own words:
I was in my office late one night in 1999 not wanting to be bothered. The phone rang, and I wanted to ignore it . . . but I felt compelled to answer. Before I could start, a child’s voice blurted, “Why do you do what you do?”
It was the last thing I had expected to hear.
The kid was simply on assignment from his school teacher to interview someone from a community service agency. He looked in the Yellow Pages and landed on my phone number.
At the time, I worked for a community-media organization and I was used to explaining in grand and overly sophisticated terms why the organization that I worked for did what it did — it’s how we got funding. I had become good at talking to funders and writing grants with big theories and detailed plans. Yet I had lost touch with the simplicity behind an unnecessary amount of complexity.
I found myself at work way too late trying to figure out some way to explain to a 12-year-old why I worked for a youth media organization and why it was important for people to create their own images, video and music (keep in mind that this was in 1998 before all this user-generated content stuff). Meanwhile, I was trying to remember if it was, in fact, important and what else might I be doing instead. Why was I doing this? I came up with something that sounded convincing to me. But, I’m a bit embarrassed to say that it was harder to answer than I expected.
I’ve thought about that phone call many times, and that question chases me around still. It’s a really simple question, yet so much depends on it. Starting in the summer of 2004, I started asking other people this question. People often say they don’t have time (or) don’t know what to answer (or) give a flip response to make fun of a question that they unknowingly fear. Many times people avoid it altogether. Other times, people’s answers inspire us or just make us laugh.
Outstanding.
Indeed