I have been doing freelance agency work this year, one of many hands on a contract team, and it put me on a project that quietly changed how I understand scale.
The work was for the City of Edmonton. A framework. A strategic policy document, a brochure, a manual, a set of guidelines, all gathered under a name I keep turning over in my head. Building a Greater Edmonton. A city foundation. A city framework.
I want to describe the feeling of it, because it is not like commercial work at all. When you design a brochure for a business, the audience is customers, and customers can choose to walk away. When you design a framework for a city, the audience is everybody who lives here, and everybody who will, and none of them chose you.
I was one designer among many, a contractor among contractors, and there is a humility in that which I found genuinely useful. You are not the author. You are a hand in something much larger than your own taste, and the work has to survive being handled by many other hands and still hold together.
What opened my eyes was the sheer scale of a municipality. The number of departments. The number of documents that must agree with one another. The number of decisions made long before I arrived that will be lived with long after I leave. I had never designed inside a system that large, and it rearranged something in me.
I do not know whether I will ever work with the city again. But I have seen the size of the thing now, and I cannot unsee it. There is a kind of design that serves a customer, and there is a kind that serves a citizen, and they are not the same job. I find I would like to do more of the second.