Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design
By Debbie Millman
How, $25.00, 218 pages
What is it that makes people buy? This is the one burning question all of us want to know the answer to. We all are selling something, and we want to know what will make people buy whatever it is that we happen to be selling. Fortunately or unfortunately, if you ask a hundred people this question, they’ll give you a hundred different answers as well. Nobody, it seems, can agree on what the right answer is. To be expected, the best (if not the right) answer (or the solution) has something to do the tool being wielded by the one who’s answering it. And in the case of Debbie Millman, author of Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design, the answer is, naturally, design.
Millman knew the answer even when she was a young girl in her father’s pharmacy, enchanted by the barrette packaging displayed along the aisles and wondering what the girl on the Carefree feminine products box was looking at in a distance. She has since parlayed her answer (which is, design) into actually making us buy stuff. And the thought-provoking personal essays she wrote in Look Both Ways will convince you—through desire, envy, optimism, embarrassment, and love, why design is the answer to the question of what it is that makes people buy.
Reviewed by Dominique James
Good for her, but it’s really sad that someone wants to spend their life trying to sell people stuff they probably don’t really want and definitely don’t need. But it’s understood that this is the unfortunate society we live in. It’s just too bad.