A mechanical mind revolves around equations. It focuses on the details, the solutions – the process of how something functions rather than how it feels or thinks.
That mind belongs to 16-year-old Austin Miles Baker, lying with his head split open in an operating room with a grapefruit-sized tumor staring back at his surgeon. What started as a few lowered grades in high school grew to reveal itself as an even bigger problem: Baker had developed a vascular tumor that mutated into a packed ball of flesh, blocking his sinuses and deteriorating his eyesight.
Baker’s father, Desmond Miles Baker, says the doctor gave him some harrowing news: “Your son is not going to live through this. We can probably get him to live longer, maybe a year.”
The doctor also said the success rate for this type of surgery wasn’t very high. In fact, it’s a whopping zero percent. But when the odds are so dismal, the only logical answer is to try all possible solutions.
And then something happened that didn’t fit the formula: Baker’s tumor began to shrink. The planned 13-hour surgery was cut down to four and Baker was rescued with a miracle – at least for the time being.
From Cape Town to Keane
At the end of a hardwood-floored hallway inside of the Orchidhouse Lofts on Mill Avenue is a room numbered 315.
It houses a four- to five-man design group that call themselves Keane Creative. Although it’s been converted from a loft to an office, the space leaves some amenities of home intact: a washer and dryer hide inside a pantry door and the designers’ work stations stand parallel to a full-sized kitchen.
The company focuses on branding and marketing for various clients, from IKEA to the Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce. Right now, they’re wrapping up a project for the Harlem Globetrotters that included website and video work, brand guidelines and overall creative strategy for a new public relations campaign.
Sitting behind his desk, the now 29-year-old Baker is the group’s creative director. He points to his illustration for Phoenix Design Week’s poster contest, which inversely juxtaposes a small boy and a mermaid who timidly reach toward each other – almost in the style of the Sistine Chapel. This year’s topic was "Perception."
“If they were try to touch each other, all that perception is gone – as soon as you make contact, as soon as you start to talk to somebody else, as soon as you get to know someone – your perceptions change and shift,” Baker says. “All of that evaporates.”
As a father of two and husband to his high school sweetheart, Baker is far removed from the hospital bed. Instead, he leans back in his chair and rests his left ankle on his knee. His desk is the first in the creative row’s group, which align themselves next to high-rise windows that let in the ambient noise of traffic and chatter from Mill Avenue.
He says artists have a problem with over-designing, and that the truth behind the good works is the actually hidden inside of conventional thinking: Design shouldn’t look like it was designed at all.
In fact, Baker says he doesn’t fit the personality of an artist and wouldn’t describe himself as one.
“I just was a person who liked to play on computer programs, I liked building websites and I liked the Internet,” Baker said. “I was a computer geek.”
Baker’s approach is more technical – most of which he learned by himself.
While attending school in Scottsdale Community College, his wife, Laura, received a Fulbright Scholarship in 2004 to study emigrational trends of communal goat herders in South Africa. Baker packed his belongings like he wasn’t coming back.
“There’s definitely a part of me that thinks it might be cool to have a degree,” Baker said. But, “there’s no part of me that thinks that would affect my career. It would just be a waste of my time and money.”
Instead, Baker explored the advertisement-driven community of Cape Town and began to cultivate his portfolio while simultaneously working in a coffee shop. It gave him time to explore and play with his newly found creative side – a part of him that became more prominent after his second surgery.
Almost exactly a year after his first, he came into his parent’s bedroom complaining of another debilitating headache. As it turned out, a rabid staph infection had developed in his brain and he was once again rushed to the hospital.
“The doctors were clueless,” his father says.
Yet right before any surgery was performed – the staff infection began to subside.
It wasn’t that the doctors were mistaken. All of the tests were showing the same diagnosis. But once again, Baker’s life was saved by some unexplained phenomenon. His father said the surgery played a very big role in his son’s artistic talents.
“He was always a numbers guy,” Desmond says. “He was always big on justice. If something wasn’t right, he didn’t like it. He almost had an engineer’s mind – which really was artistic in its expression.”
Yet instead of a wild rendition of the paint-buckets-thrown-on-canvas type, Baker’s style is collected and focused. His vision as a creative director accumulates the chaos of the team’s creativity and spits it back to function as a well-oiled machine. Even though his personal list of past clients includes names like Sears, he’s still shocked when his designs look good. In reality, the recognition he wants to receive is more humbling.
“I want someone to someday come up to me and mention something that I did without knowing I did it,” Baker said. “That still drives me to do the work I do now.”
If Baker is surprised at his work, his previous co-worker and mentor Michael Campbell is not.
While both men worked for SiteWire, they formed a dynamic relationship: Campbell would teach Baker and Baker would influence Campbell. He was the first person to see social media’s potential, Campbell said.
“Immediately, he and I had a connection because I understood what he was trying to do,” Campbell said. “We had a bureaucracy that we could get it done together.”
Campbell recognized that the young designer was a fresh thinker and an easy adapter.
“Austin is a really quick study,” Campbell said. “I have a lot of tricks up my sleeve, and he sees them – and he’s quick to pick up on it.”
That same mentality goes with Keane’s description of being and acting fearless. Fearless to open both eyes after a brain surgery. Fearless to pack bags to South Africa. Fearless to continue to be a thought leader.
And fearless to explore the endless possibilities of the “what if,” – whether it be in design or in the mysteries of the human mind.
Reach the reporter at uvitkovs@asu.edu
