I am here in the bookbinding workshop at Gerrit Rietveld Academie where freelancer graphic designer O works every Tuesday and Thursday. After changing plans, we finally manage to meet each other. Due to the busy schedule he has until the Christmas break, I come here to steal some of his working hours. We leave the workshop and students behind with a little bit of guilt. We walk inside the academy to find a quiet room. We sit in an empty meeting room, start a new audio recording and the interview begins.

I ask him a question that I have been holding since I met him and he introduced himself as a freelance graphic designer. “What does freelance mean to you?” He is lost in thought for a moment and wonders himself why he keeps on doing it. He is used to saying it because the definition of freelance for him is he can do a broader range of work. Even though it gives us this connotation of floating between and around things, being a freelance designer takes us to a broader range of works, and we have responsibilities to choose the opportunities that we can take. Sometimes he can be an exhibition constructor in the same field by bringing in his interests in spatial design and architecture. Even if he makes a publication, he considers it as an object and visualises how it unfolds the story itself in space. Freelance is also about uncertainty. We have to be aware of that. For some time, he wasn’t aware of what it means to be jumping from one to the other. The moment that he doesn’t know what work he has, then he creates work himself, which he might not get paid for, but it still keeps him busy. He doesn’t see it as precarity. It is better to think of it as flexibility, the opportunity we to grow.

He could bring so much of himself into his work by having the freedom of a continuous change in the work. Once a fashion brand company, T.H offered him a full-time job for 3D rendering, which would have been financially beneficial for him. He was willing to learn new skills, but he asked the guy why he was quitting the job, and he replied, “the work is very dull, sitting in the office all day, and there is no excitement.” And O realised that routine labour and repetition of the same activities were exactly what he didn’t want to do. His father always says to him, “When you don’t have something binding, then you can do whatever. You can still have fun. Don’t lock yourself up too early. Otherwise, you might regret it later.”

The chronic instability caused by unexpected developments, permanent innovation, ever-changing opportunities and possibilities in the fluid workplace. In the beginning, he enjoyed this freedom of choosing the day to work because he could do whatever, even though the future was pressing on him. Freedom, that is what keeps him excited, but in return, it takes a lot of energy. He stopped being too picky. At some point he was. He used to deny work because he might not like the person or project. Work became a personal aspect and hobby at that moment. But now, he is also taking projects that require him to learn programming, for example. Things that he does not know how to do, but he gives it a try to expand his skills and to get bigger projects that might, in the long run, financially benefit him as well. He is faced with the challenge of constantly updating his skills to take advantage of changing opportunities and be able to turn every opportunity that presents itself into a win-win situation. They teach them in Estonia, “you have to take care of everything”, and at some point, he was getting bored with this. “Time to have too much fun and be floating around as a designer is almost over for me because at some point I want to buy a house.” The older we get the more we try to settle down and have free time to do other things.

A freelance designer is mentally flexible, which makes it possible to be open to new situations and new ideas. When he has a new client, he has to get used to a new project. “You have to research it, read about it, you have to have a new role in each project.” He includes the research processes in his quotations as well. It is not simple to measure the time that goes into developing ideas. A good concept or a good design can emerge from the brilliant brain of a designer in a second, but it can equally take days, weeks, and even months. Often this process is invisible, but we can play with it.

While I am listening to him talking about his life, I find myself impressed by how incredibly good he is at storytelling. He is a good performer. For a designer, the only way to convince clients of an idea is verbally, through language. “The public and the linguistic are so central in the Post-Fordian workplace.”⁽²³⁾ Even if there is no good idea, designers still rely on our linguistic skills to constantly give the impression that we are deep in thought and hard at work to come up with the ideas.

In a liquid, flexible world, designers must have their own hybrid attitudes if they want to continue their artistic career. That means, their autonomy will rely on their capacity to deal with and act on a social, economic and creative level. To do this, they need the support of many others. He feeds himself with so much information that he learns from other people that he might not learn if he worked at a company where he had one assignment with the same design template with different contents. We cannot really grow ourselves that way. As a freelance designer, he has more ground to get into new worlds of new knowledge, new skills, and new people. He met so many interesting people, which he is very happy about. He likes to be free and relaxed when he works with his clients. The informal relationships lead to them knowing more about each other. Go out and talk about their personal lives, how things are going with their lovers or with parents. In an informal chat, the thinking capacity of the designer can be always on without his noticing. So it can increase production as well. They meet to work cheerfully, and better to make a work for them or with them. (That is their babies and souls. You have to know the essence of their way of being.) His clients end up being his friends, which can also be dangerous, as they might ask him too much from him. But he loves the way it is now, building this strong friendship with his clients. “You grow your friend group much bigger.” He also learns a lot from the job that he has at the bar, that he can bring into his design practices, such as how to talk to people and how to suggest things. Often people do not know what they want and he suggests it to them. This keeps his life interesting and busy by having this one day.

Social relations are so central in the workplace. Freelancers can overcome their solidarity by collaborating with clients as well as cooperating with other designers under one roof. Sharing studio space creates a sort of secure feeling. He has moved his studio two times and he has shared the studio space with many other designers in the last five years. On the Cristina Morini explains in am Italian online publication platform Doppiozero, that coworking is “a useful idea born from the bottom up, to try to draw work away from the individualisation and isolation brought about by precarity, by insisting on the social and collaborative aspect of the process”.⁽²⁴⁾ Freelance designers should be able to get along together and there is a certain obligation to create positive affectivity, which is deeply rooted in the habitus of the freelancers themselves. An American artist Martha Rosler who focus on everyday life and the public sphere wrote an article called “Why are people being so nice?”. “The social pressure to be nice goes far deeper than an imperative for good neighborly relations.”⁽²⁵⁾ The context is that the art world has entered into this globalizing economy where work and public relations are closely related. So these examples highlight that the human relations element is a vital role for designers that requires a certain degree of trust.