How the Fountain Institute Started and Where It's Going

by Jeff Humble

Dear Reader,

In case you missed it, Hannah dropped a pretty big announcement in the last newsletter.

I wanted to tell the story of how the Fountain Institute started, why we’ve never had an “About Us” page, and where I think we’re headed next.

How it started

The Fountain Institute started when two friends decided to grab a beer and work...then kept doing it for 7 years.

There were many false starts along the way. Starting a company feels like slowly uncovering a map and constantly realizing that you're in the wrong place moving in the wrong direction.

Whenever we needed to see more of the map, we did something we would return to over and over: we talked to potential customers.

What we found is something that still drives the Fountain Institute. It's that there is a hole in the middle of your design career.

What I mean is there are tons of providers promising to help you become a designer. And there are tons of boutique (and expensive) providers for those at the top. But almost nobody cares when you're in the middle.

As a design manager, I watched my in-house design team struggle to find courses that were interesting and relevant even with a yearly budget of €1,000.

That's the business environment that the Fountain Institute appeared, but there was also a human side to the story that we rarely talk about.

Why there is no "about us" page

We don't have an "about" page on the Fountain Institute's website, and that's on purpose.

Hannah and I did a lot of brand and vision work before we launched. Maybe it wasn't strictly necessary, but it was a lot of fun. We wanted the Fountain Institute to have something intangible beneath the surface that you had to work to understand...and most importantly, it should be about more than the two of us.

We weren't influencers creating a course to monetize our audience. We wanted to design learning experiences that felt different...that stuck with you.

Hannah used her art background to find inspiration in avant-garde arts education of the past like Black Mountain College. We sweated through prototypes in a crowded art studio in Berlin to the sound of our studio mate, Craig, always using the buzzsaw.

We landed on something that worked: a master's-level course you could take in the evening after work (funded by your company) that felt more like playing a game then watching a lecture.

I'm convinced that what made our little indie school work was that Hannah and I are open to pretty much anything. No matter what happened, we found a way to laugh and roll with it. That's a very useful mindset for facilitating a class and also for founding a company.

Where it's going

I'm telling you all of this now because I think there is still a hole in the middle of design careers, and I think that AI has the potential to turn that hole into an abyss.

Here's a slide we put at the end of every event:

For us, it's never been about the pixels or the portfolios.

Now more than ever, we need to think about design as a way of thinking, not just producing.

In the next fifteen years, I believe that designers will own the future.

Not the product manager, not the engineer, not the marketer...the designer.

There is something about the way designers think, the way they orchestrate the possible with the practical that will be sorely needed in the AI age.

If you're a designer that wants to be a part of that future, you're in the right place.

And if you can spare 3 minutes, there’s one thing that would really help us.

Take this quick survey and tell us what you want to learn.

It will help shape what we build over the coming year, and (as always) we’d love to hear from you.

Help us evolve our offerings

Survey time: ~3 minutes.

​Source​

According to a report by Orgvue, 39% of business leaders made employees redundant due to AI deployment. However, among that number, 55% admit wrong decisions about those redundancies were made.

Talk to you in 2 weeks! ✌️

Jeff Humble ​Designer & Co-Founder ​The Fountain Institute

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