WHAT'S DESIGN? MANY PEOPLE HAVE asked me this question, and it's not easy at all to actually come up with just one absolute and definite answer. In fact, as I am going to be teaching a course with a title roughly translated as "design culture," it might be a good idea for me to try to answer this question in a series of post: Something that I can also utilize as an outline for each of my lecture (clever, right?).
Well, you know I always believe that writing is a great great tool to facilitate just about everything. We think in language, so therefore writing is the act of putting words into strings that help you make sense of the chaotic thoughts floating, running, and moving in the mind. Now, first thing first, I'll leave the answer to the question above for letter. I think the first thing to discuss here is the meaning of the word we usually hear but don't usually define.
That word is "creativity." The origin of this word is credited to the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947, who is also credited for saying "All (Western) philosophy consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."). To Whitehead, creativity simply means the act of "self-creation and self-determination." He's talking, of course, about metaphysics, an we are unlikely to get into Western philosophy in this post. Creativity: This very term that Whitehead had coined, however, has had a great impact on how we think about design.
Last time I checked, there're more than a hundred books with the title "creativity" in their titles in circulation as we speak. Upon browsing them, I didn't find any special meanings of creativity. It's all the same old same old "the art of innovation," "newness that works," "a quality of a genius." None of these definitions helps anyone to understand. In fact, the notion that creativity is "a quality of a genius" is just discriminatingly misleading (for the reason that this blog will outline).
Many actually believe, in essence, that "design is a product of creativity," but what exactly is creativity. If the term entails the notion of "creation," then, aren't we all creative by default since in order to survive we'd need to constantly "create" (e.g., income, opportunity, etc)?
Let start with a great example of what the thinker Kevin Ashton, a British technology pioneer who after having immigrated to the US co-founded the Auto-ID Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a theorist who also coined today's widely popular term "the internet of things," calls the "myth of creativity." This excerpt is from his book How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery (which is one of the 44 books that changed my life): In 1815, Germany's General Music Journal published a letter in which Mozart described his creative process: When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer; say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.
All this fires my soul, and provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost finished and complete in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once.
When I proceed to write down my ideas the committing to paper is done quickly enough, for everything is, as I said before, already finished; and it rarely differs on paper from what it was in my imagination. In other words, Mozart's greatest symphonies, concertos, and operas came to him complete when he was alone and in a good mood. He needed no tools to compose them. Once he had finished imagining his masterpieces, all he had to do was write them down. This is a typical "genius" story.
We all know how great Mozart was as a composer, but let's continue reading: But there is a problem. Mozart did not write this letter. It is a forgery. This was first shown in 1856 by Mozart's biographer Otto Jahn and has been confirmed by other scholars since. This is true.
Historians have provided evidence of how Mozart had become who he was -- "a great composer" -- not by his "ingenuity," "prodigy" or "inborn quality" just but by his willpower to work hard, long hour, and ability to go back to the drawing board (or music score) to revise, rewrite, and rethink his creative work. Ashton continues: Mozart's real letters— to his father, to his sister, and to others—reveal his true creative process. He was exceptionally talented, but he did not write by magic.
He sketched his compositions, revised them, and sometimes got stuck. He could not work without a piano or harpsichord. He would set work aside and return to it later. He considered theory and craft while writing, and he thought a lot about rhythm, melody, and harmony. Even though his talent and a lifetime of practice made him fast and fluent, his work was exactly that: work.
Masterpieces did not come to him complete in uninterrupted streams of imagination, nor without an instrument, nor did he write them down whole and unchanged. The letter is not only forged, it is false." In fact, historians argued that it might have taken him almost two decades to cultivate his greatness -- about 10,000 hours of practicing arguing the author Malcolm Gladwell. Here is what he explains in his masterpiece Outliers: The Story of Success: This is true even of people we think of as prodigies.
Mozart, for example, famously started writing music at six. But, writes the psychologist Michael Howe in his book Genius Explained, "...by the standards of mature composers, Mozart's early works are not outstanding. The earliest pieces were all probably written down by his father, and perhaps improved in the process. Many of Mozart's childhood compositions, such as the first seven of his concertos for piano and orchestra, are largely arrangements of works by other composers.
Of those concertos that only contain music original to Mozart, the earliest that is now regarded as a masterwork (No. 9, K. 271) was not composed until he was twenty-one: by that time Mozart had already been composing concertos for ten years." The music critic Harold Schonberg goes further: Mozart, he argues, actually "developed late," since he didn't produce his greatest work until he had been composing for more than twenty years. To become a chess grandmaster also seems to take about ten years.
(Only the legendary Bobby Fischer got to that elite level in less than that amount of time: it took him nine years.) And what's ten years? Well, it's roughly how long it takes to put in ten thousand hours of hard practice.
Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness." So, what's creative about Mozart's music was a result of his ability to oscillate between "what's been composed and what can be composed." In Solving Problems with Design Thinking Ten Stories of What Works by Jeanne Liedtka, Andrew King, and Kevin Bennett, this process, similar to that of Mozart's, can be summarized in the act of carefully answering four questions: What Is? What If? What Wow? and What Works?
And I don't think this comment would make Mozart any less great than he was. His music is timeless, inspiring, and sophisticated -- it's the work of art. But what this comment does is that it "humanizes the notion of creativity" and shines a different light on Mozart as a human being -- just like you and me. I think we should all be happy to hear that instead of thinking less of Mozart as a great composer. He still was, and his music will always be great.
It turns out that everyone whom we admire has to go through a similar process of being tested. Excellent soccer players, musicians, artists aren't born with those skills. So, where does the urge of wanting to see Mozart, and David Beckham, the Beatles, Picasso, etc., as inborn geniuses? Kevin Ashton again: "The myth of creativity" lives on because it appeals to romantic prejudices about invention. There is a myth about how something new comes to be. Geniuses have dramatic moments of insight where great things and thoughts are born whole.
Poems are written in dreams. Symphonies are composed complete. Science is accomplished with eureka shrieks. Businesses are built by magic touch. Something is not, then is. We do not see the road from nothing to new, and maybe we do not want to. Artistry must be misty magic, not sweat and grind.
It dulls the luster to think that every elegant equation, beautiful painting, and brilliant machine is born of effort and error, the progeny of false starts and failures, and that each maker is as flawed, small, and mortal as the rest of us. It is "seductive" to conclude that great innovation is delivered to us by miracle via genius. And so the myth.
Psychologists and biological anthropologist argue that the size and shape of our brains haven't change so much for at least 15,000 years; therefore, there's nothing innate in the brains that think "a stone tool is enough" and "we need something better than a stone tool." What changed, however, was the ability to elevate our cognitive ability to better solve problems and issues of everyday life. A quote from Kevin Ashton: "This is one reason the creativity myth is so terribly wrong. Creating is not rare.
We are all born to do it. If it seems magical, it is because it is innate. If it seems like some of us are better at it than others, that is because it is part of being human, like talking or walking. We are not all equally creative, just as we are not all equally gifted orators or athletes.
But we can all create." The education expert Sir Ken Robinson (whose TED Talk on the subject is pretty pretty awesomest if you haven't seen it yet) argues that we're all born creative which, from an evolutionary perspective, is the innate quality with which we are all born. In essence, it's the quality that allows us to live, communicate, reproduce, revolutionize and move through time.
For Robinson, we have become less creative owing to the process of standardization of education, which focuses on giving people, well, the standardizable skill So, the lessons are simple: First, the idea that "you have to be born creative to be creative is a myth (AKA "creativity myth"); so, let's undo that idea, once and for all, completely. It's nonsense, not true, and not useful at all; Second, to be excellent/good/great at something, one has to work for it.
Some says it takes about 10,000 or 10 years straight to be an expert on something. It's true. Our brain needs that much practice, trial and error, tactile learning, to be able to comprehend the variety of experience. If what we think as creative is something "new and useful," what this means is that it takes that much time for the brain and our body to be comprehend the basics and therefore generate such novelty that works. So, be patient.
Third, creativity is a process, and not innate quality (which goes back to the first point), which means that it's something that everyone, including you and me, could cultivate; and, Fourth, the notion of creativity is built inside all of us (AKA "innate"). The society puts things in hierarchy. Would you say that David Beckham is more talented than Mozart? It would be like comparing an apple to an orange.
Just because someone sees Mozart's music as more important than the art of wiping the floor clean (which I am by the way very good at because I have a very creative way of going about doing it -- I am proud of it, hey) doesn't mean that wiping the floor cannot be creative.
Why We Should "Stop Trying" instead of "Trying Our Best"