Creating Safe Spaces for Feedback

Fuel from Mary Carns and Halftank Studio

There's a moment that happens reliably on critique day. The student who has been confident all semester — the one with strong opinions, the one who always has something to say — goes quiet. Their work is on the wall. The room is looking at it. And they are suddenly, visibly, somewhere else entirely.

I taught introductory graphic design for three semesters as an adjunct at George Mason University School of Art. Critique days were when I learned the most, and it wasn't always from the students.

Before we started, I would tell them the same thing every time: a critique is a suggestion, not a to-do list. When someone responds to your work, they're telling you how they feel when they see it. That's all. You are not required to act on every feeling in the room. When it was my turn to weigh in, I used the compliment sandwich — something positive, the feedback, something positive again. Not because it's a magic formula, but because it made the room feel safe enough for the feedback to actually reach people. A critique only works if the person on the receiving end isn't already in fight-or-flight. I graded them on whether they showed up, not on whether they survived the feedback without flinching. Showing up was the whole assignment.

Watching their relief when I said that reminded me of something I'd been carrying around for years without quite naming it.

I spent a stretch of my career at a company I call Rifiuti in my memoir — and for a period of time, I was teaching at George Mason and working there simultaneously. Rifiuti was happy to mention my teaching gig when talking to clients. It was an asset, something that signaled I could communicate, explain, lead. What they didn't seem to notice, or didn't care about, was that everything I was doing in that classroom ran completely counter to how they ran their own critiques.

There were four designers on the team at the time, and when we presented our work, all four of us would stand at the front of the room together. I have thought about that configuration many times since. Four people, standing in a row, presenting to a group of executives who would tell us, one by one, what they didn't like. It felt exactly like being a target in a shooting gallery. And we stood there and took it, each of us working on separate projects, every person for themselves once the comments started flying.

When an executive told me they didn't like something I'd done, I felt it as an attack. So I matched their energy. I reacted with anger, which of course confirmed whatever they already thought about me. The framework I would later hand to nervous students — the one about suggestions and feelings and not treating feedback as a to-do list — was nowhere in that room. Not because I didn't know it. Because the room wasn't designed to allow for anything resembling safety.

That's the distinction I didn't fully understand until I was standing in front of a classroom watching someone else be afraid. A critique only works when both sides have agreed, at least implicitly, that the goal is to make the work better. When that agreement is absent — when the feedback is really about power, or performance, or keeping people off-balance — no framework survives contact with the environment.

My students were nervous because critique felt like judgment. I could tell them it wasn't, and mean it, because in my classroom it genuinely wasn't. At Rifiuti, it was. The four of us standing there in a row could have been a team. In retrospect, we could have collaborated more, compared notes, and had each other's backs when the comments started. We didn't, partly because our projects were siloed, and partly because no one had told us we were allowed to. No wonder that by the time I got laid off from Rifiuti a couple of years later, I was the only designer left.

Writing this memoir has been its own version of critique day. You put the work on the wall. People tell you how they feel when they see it. My editor told me the ending was too dark — not as a to-do list item, but as honest feedback about what the room was experiencing. I didn't match his energy this time. I went back to my work and found what was missing.

That's what the training was always for. It just took me a while to use it outside of school.

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