All posts by anomalogue

Natural birth for creativity

Ideas

This morning I’m thinking about the natural birth movement, and some of the things natural birth pioneer Dr. Robert Bradley (yeah, a man) had to say about labor pains — that if you don’t resist the pain and try to eliminate it, but allow it to happen and work with it, labor time decreases and the perception of the pain shifts to a perception of hard work. And anesthetization, which necessitates contraction-inducing medicines such as Pitocin, prolong labor and decrease the body’s autonomy and ultimately increase the physical and psychological pain-level, necessitating more anesthesia, producing more numbing which necessitates more artificial induction, and so on, in a vicious circle. Bradley also mentions that ignorance or misconceptions about labor contribute to perceived need for anesthesia. The fear of the unknown makes women can cause women to tense up against the contractions, or they might rush the labor, or follow what they believe is “proper technique” and make themselves hyperventilate like we see on TV.

Comparing all this to ideation, the metaphorical possibilities seem pretty vast.

I’m playing with the idea of presenting about this pain-affirming approach to creativity as a sort of “natural birth for ideation” movement.

We should stop trying to hard to manage pain out of creative ideation. We should stop relying so much on ideation techniques designed to artificially induce ideas from groups. And we should instead concentrate on ways to help teams go deeper into problems, which means to maximize their problematic nature, make them as wicked as they truly are.

Essential discomfort in creativity

Ideas

Occasionally I’ve worried that my emphasis on the uncomfortable aspects of creativity might strike some people as dwelling on things that are best underplayed or endured silently, and then I ask myself if it might be prudent to suppress this truth or to tone it down or sweeten it by overemphasizing the fun and rewarding aspects.

Then it occurs to me that my favorite and most exciting projects were ones that were allowed to run their course through the painful stretches and to come out on the other side to breakthrough. And the less satisfying ones, the ones that felt predominantly unpleasant (thankfully, few), were the ones where well-meaning (or nervous) people interfered and tried to shut down doubt and dissent, anesthetize the pain of (as yet) incompatible perspectives and establish an instant superficial peace.

So I am going to continue to hammer on the importance of embracing perplexity and anxiety as a means to innovation. I believe it is terribly important to get real about what is involved in our work, so we can support it, work more effectively and avoid wasting energy fretting needlessly over “things going wrong”, when in fact they are going right.

*

From a 2007 Fast Company article profiling Yves Béhar:

Yves Béhar’s ability to anticipate—and incarnate —consumer lust routinely brings executives to his door, saying, “We want to be the Apple of our industry.”

And Béhar has an impertinent question for them, too: “Do you have the guts?”

Show this to your average executive, it will appear to mean: “are you prepared to try something and assume the risk that it might not work as you hope”?

This stress of unforeseeability — let’s call it “nervousness” — is certainly part of the pain of the dealing with the new and unknown, but it is not the primary source of the pain. I don’t think it is what Béhar is talking about.

To get a clearer sense of specifically what kind of guts are needed to be Apple and what you must be prepared to undergo read Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs. It’s for want of this kind of guts — and not the ingenuity of Jonathan Ive or the executive prowess of Tim Cook, and really not even Steve Jobs’ own prophetic powers — that have prevented companies from inspiring their customers the way artists have.

Just think about it, and see what you notice.

Musical active ingredient

Ideas

Most really potent music has a strain of pain running through it, and this pain is the music’s active ingredient. The pain can be expressive of itself — but it is most interesting if it is sublimated. Some examples: Nick Drake’s best work has sublimated depression as its primary ingredient. The Kinks at their 1966-71 peak was rich in sublimated nostalgic sadness immediately recognizable to any parent of older children.

The active ingredient of psychedelic music is sublimated dread in the face of infinity.

Primate art

Ideas

Some people want art that reconnects them to primordial feelings any primate can have.

Some people want art that connects them to primordial feelings only a human being can ever have — and perhaps feelings for which he has only very recently acquired a capacity to feel, or is on the cusp of acquiring.

*

Isn’t it strange that we have words for most of those feelings we can recognize in our wordless siblings, the animals? Rage, sadness, peacefulness, affection…

It is where we are uniquely our own species, dominated by language, where, strangely, language fails us.

*

I’m going my take a crack at the “humans are the ______ animal” formula…

Humans are the naturally artificial animal.

We humans have biologically co-evolved with culture for so long now, that the notion of a human being liberated from culture is an absurdity. Human beings are essentially the interplay of essence and accident. Human being, being human, is corrupted when purified of accident.

*

I want art to give form to the primordial experiences we have come to have, not to re-express the feelings we have had all along, feelings that everyone one of us can have, feelings that have enjoyed the benefit of language for hundreds of millennia — common feelings.

I want art that shows us a future some of us can feel, and many more will come to feel, as geist finds form. I want future-oriented art that participates in human being’s perpetual self-creation.

 

Uncommon

Ideas

It is a mistake to believe the most common primordial experiences are the only primordial experiences.

The more common something is, the more likely it will be recognized, named and afforded full status of “really real” — even if it lacks material reality. Nobody doubts the existence of joy, anger, arousal, love, power-lust, peacefulness, sadness, resolve, and other named emotions and states-of-mind, despite the fact that these “things” aren’t really things. A material thing that cannot be commonly perceived would be understood to be supernatural or a hallucination. What matters is not the constitution of a thing, but whether its existence is commonly acknowledged.

The canon of common “primordial experiences” is a small subset of something larger and weirder.

*

Whatever is truly uncommon is likely to languish in formless isolation.

A capacity for an uncommon experience might be intrinsic to particular human natures. Or a capacity may somehow develop, but despite its nurtured origin still awake and emerge from behind the soul, spontaneously and immediately as nature itself, and for all practical purposes is primordial (even if it is not biographically “first in order”). But these experiences lack both names and expressive language, because these experiences flare up and die out in individuals before they can be bestowed with language or form of any kind, which is the precondition for recognition by others, and even recollectability in the individual. The experiences get imprisoned in individuals, or solitary cells of moments.

All this makes these capacities and experiences no less primordial, and no less deserving of artistic expression. I would argue it makes them more deserving. For such uncommonalities, art is the only salvation, and perhaps is their rightful domain.

After all, good weather can make you joyous, an enemy can anger you, a body can arouse you, etc. Art is redundant when it stimulates a common experience that can happen elsewhere. Maybe that’s why art that stimulates these feelings is so easily appreciated. It can be seen as representative art that represents recognizable feelings instead of images.You can look at it and to be able to say “what it is”. There’s not that much difference between “that’s Marilyn Monroe” and “that’s sad”.

*

For the uncommon, art is a scarce gate into reality.

*

Uncommonness and objective rarity are two different concepts. A thing that occurs infrequently or even only once, but which occurs always in a way accessible to all people is still common, however infrequent or unique the occurrence. When a comet flashes through the sky once every ten thousand years, every eye pointed at the right place at the right time will perceive it.

Uncommonness is a capacity for experience, which, whether innate or acquired, will cause one person out of one thousand to respond differently to a thing from the other nine hundred and ninety-nine.

*

Genre art excites common primordial experiences. Blues. Country. Classic Rock. Metal. Punk. Reggae. They’re all designed for common appeal. Sometimes these genres reach into the uncommon, but that is not the basis of their popularity, and it is not for the sake of the uncommon that these genres have developed their formal conventions.

*

The art I care about is art that draws out feelings that apes cannot have.

The art I care about calls to the remote corners of humanness and momentarily keeps mutely isolated spirits of loneliness. It hushes the noise of the primordial commons so something quiet and wordless can speak and for once be heard.

Such art is essentially groping. It “does not know its way about.” It “feels around in the dark until it gets the idea.” Once it loses this quality and this characteristic it ceases to be uncommon. That is its end, and that is the end of it.

Maturity

Ideas

Hubristic youth believes the world has been made needlessly complex, and that “I” alone, by some miracle (perhaps that same miracle that also placed me in the dead center of my own experience and not elsewhere?) have insight into to the simple heart of the matter…

Clearly this is an unstable state of affairs that is going to end one way or another. Most of the time it will eventually tip over into in its antithesis, a bitter-saccharine docility that accepts deportation to the outer regions of existence to play a far humbler role that’s become good enough for a new, much smaller, less central “me”.

There are other routes beyond of youth. There are better, far more desirable visions of maturity. But to have it, one must take alternate routes, and those routes are not highways (even when those highways are labeled “Alternative”).

Group interviews

Design

If you interview a group, do not make the mistake of thinking you are efficiently interviewing many individuals at once.

If you are interviewing a group you are interviewing a group. So make sure that the group you are interviewing represents a group who will be acting together in real life in whatever situation you are trying to learn about. Otherwise, you will interview the wrong group, even if it is made up of fragments of the right groups.

By the same principle, if you interview individual constituents of a group, do not make the mistake of thinking you will understand the group once you’ve interviewed each and every member. If you want to understand how a group thinks, you must interview the group.

(Obviously, I’m again using Buber’s distinction between social and interhuman.)

Living Alexander

Ideas

Christopher Alexander has been on my mind lately. My company just moved locations, and improved its environment a thousand-fold. Everywhere I look I see examples of densely interconnected living patterns, and it has exactly the effect on me Alexander describes. I feel more alive here.

Yesteday, entering the studio space it occurred to me how different it is to work with patterns when one is a participant in the effect of the pattern. With Alexander’s patterns, the self is always inside and an intrinsic participant in what is happening. This is entirely different from how design patterns are employed in an engineering context. The formal aspects are retained, but the kernel of the problem that moved Alexander is entirely absent. You could say the problem got flipped inside-out, and in the process was transformed from a uniquely existentialist approach to design to a far more mundane system for organizing puzzle-solving heuristics.

Two comments on Heidegger

Ideas

1) I am uncertain I am right about this, but [early] Heidegger appears to view death and demise as separate, but essentially linked in that both refer to the end of life. Whether he means “impossibility of Dasein” to refer primarily to something coinciding with biological death or simply emphasizes it, I think the emphasis is misplaced. Any deep change in Dasein’s orientation to being-in-the-world is a kind of death, and it is here that the religious conceptions of death-and-rebirth have their sense. Anxiety occurs whenever Dasein is faced with a future transformation that it cannot foresee with any degree of specificity, and the anxiety intensifies with the degree of impossibility of foresight. An impending religious rebirth is existentially equivalent to biological extinction.

2) Heidegger (appears to) see Dasein in strictly individualistic terms. I believe Dasein exists collectively, and that even an individual comprises a plurality of Daseins. And I believe what can be said of individual Dasein can be said of supra-individual Dasein. Most importantly collective Dasein can be authentic or inauthentic. Heidegger’s factical situation misled him to believe collectivity is essentially inauthentic, and therefore always “the They”. It might be that any Dasein will eventually discover a limit to the being in which it can participate, and all beyond that point it will encounter They, but I deny this boundary is necessarily that of the individual. Unfortunately, this denial is based entirely in faith, and not in experience. My personal experience confirms Heidegger’s views.

Both of these points have deep practical consequences for how I live in the mundane world, the hopes I hold for it, and my strategies for acting in it.

Art, engineering, design

Design

Without thinking about it, we tend to associate certain types of creative activities with certain media. We assume songs are created artistically, machines are engineered and brochures are designed.

This is not true at all. Not only are many supposed designs actually art — much of what is done in interaction design is a species of engineering. Entire genres of music have been designed (pop) or engineered (serial music). And some of what is thought of as pure engineering is actually art or design. (If German cars were only well-engineered, nobody would care about them.)

*

Design is something beyond art and engineering. It is not a combination of the two, or even a higher synthesis.

Design involves a wholly different approach entirely outside of what happens in even the best art and the best engineering. Both art and engineering (and combinations of the two) can be done without reference to any other people than the creator and the creation. Design is always done in reference to third parties who are understood to perceive, conceive, feel and behave differently from the creator. A creator can attempt to design without direct involvement of users, but this means resorting to speculative design processes.

*

If you are making a thing solely to please your own sensibility, you are making art.

If you are making a thing solely to function in some defined way, you are engineering.

If you are making a thing and involving the people who will be experiencing that thing and concerning yourself with their sensibilities and their functional needs, you are designing.

 

 

Want creativity for real?

Design

If you want creativity here’s what you really need:

  1. The right approach.
    Business approaches things in a way that’s good for many things, but generally not good for creativity. For one thing, everything’s decided in meetings, through explicit communication by words, numbers and images. Explicit communication will not produce creativity. For another, business loves step-by-step processes. When you say creative process, your average business person will think you’ve got some assembly line string of techniques by which a creation is built up bit by bit. Trying to do things this way guarantees sterility. Creativity requires a lot of pre-verbal (or even permanently non-verbal) intuitive leaps which though testable are not provable, and these leaps cannot be constructed, extracted, extruded or in any way fabricated, but only prepared for, stimulated, coaxed, encouraged — all highly un-macho approaches, which will drive the average exec nuts waiting, and will tempt him reach for the nearest convenient analytical tool to cut through the bullshit and dig out the golden egg.
  2. The right expectations.
    Let’s get this straight up front: Creativity is harrowing. It is non-linear, unpredictable, risky, and in practice often feels like shit. If your organization cannot handle this reality, you’ll have to compete with something other than meaningful differentiation — probably organizational effectiveness. That’s okay. A lot of companies find success that way. And like everyone, you’ll probably talk all about your revolutionary innovations and nobody’ll believe you, and you’ll do just fine. You’ll never be anything like Apple, Nike, Starbucks, Virgin, etc., etc., though.
  3. The right team.
    It is taboo to say this, but it is totally true, and you know it. Most people are not creative. Not only are they uncreative, but they’re creativity poison, because they cannot stand the feeling of being exposed to creative processes and do everything in their power to make that feeling go away (because of all the unpleasant characteristics, listed in the point above). Putting the wrong people on a creative team will make creativity impossible. I don’t know why executives who pride themselves on their cold-eyed realism and their ability to make hard calls and all that go all mushy sentimental on this point, but it would profit them to get realer, meaner and tougher on this point and staff the kitchen with people who can take the heat. But no. Everyone’s packed right in, and people are running around sweating and bitching about getting singed on the burner, and that the raw eggs and the baking soda don’t taste like cake. It’s damn hard to get anything cooked.
  4. The right inputs.
    Many designers secretly or openly detest research. And they should. Because all most research does is tie a designer’s hands by telling them all the cool stuff they want to do won’t fly. It closes down possibilities. But if you were to give designers something that opens up possibilities by inspiring them to conceive totally new approaches they’d eat it right up, because that is what designers live for. The type of research finding that opens up possibilities is an insight. Few marketing/insights departments know how to provide insight, even though they believe that providing customer “insights” is their core competency. When they say “insights” what they mean is facts — information about customers — their stats, behaviors, needs, wants, attitudes, and what have you. Insights are not essentially factual, and they are often not even expressible in language at all. The best source of insights is actually exposure to concrete people, environments and situations, and the best expression of those insights are often not words, graphs, or even cool diagrams, or anything else you might expect to find in a report, but rather ideas on what might work for those people in those environments and situations. But when this happens there’s always some process prig lying in wait ready to tell them they’re “getting ahead of themselves” and that their ideas are premature. They’re wrong. These premature ideas are the expression of having an insight. Don’t get attached to the ideas, but do keep them, because they are raw insight ore that can be melted down, refined and articulated — or simply “gotten”.
  5. The right conditions.
    Creativity is not only ugly and temperamental, it is also needy and fragile. It needs protection, but protection of a kind that seems counter-intuitive. To protect creativity, you have to restrain yourself from protecting the participants from the painful effects. If a creative team is not struggling in the dark, suffering from intense anxiety, infighting, bickering, hating it, with no end in sight until the end is suddenly in sight, they’re not doing anything that will blow anyone’s mind. Let them suffer. But don’t add more pain. Don’t interrupt them with the chickenshit that you think is urgently important. Think of the creative team’s hell as a pressurized tank. Your interruption will puncture it and let out all the pressure and deflate what’s trying to happen. As if this weren’t already too much, there’s one more indulgence you should lavish on your ugly-ass creative process: provide decent space with room to draw, sit, stand, fight, walk comfortably, all with minimal outside stimuli. A rule of thumb: keep creative suffering pure of mundane contaminants.
  6. The right tests.
    The usual tests of validity of ideas in business cannot do justice to creative ideas: 1) demanding analytical justification for why something will work, and 2) submitting it to the semi-informed opinions of people sitting around in a conference room. This procedure is 95% certain to kill off ideas that would work and support crappy ideas that should never have seen the light of day. The only legitimate way to test a creative idea is to prototype it and put it in front of real live human beings. After a prototype test is done and the idea survives it or its suckiness is exposed… then arguments for and against that idea and how it tested can be made.
  7. The right support
    Creative ideas need support before, in the form of these all these items in this list. But also, you need people to make the ideas happen. To execute. Such people are called “executives”. If you throw responsibility on creatives to make execution happen, ideas will always be proved impractical, because execution is a talent of its own. That’s because creative vision and genius for execution are two entirely different talents that do not always coincide in the same personality. One of the great things about business is that we get to combine our talents in ways that cancel out our weaknesses and allow us to accomplish things that would otherwise be impossible. A smarter division of labor based on more realistic psychology, that permits creatives to conceive visionary ideas and executives to execute and actualize them would produce far more brilliant results.

Splattering

Ideas

Epistemology interrogates answers; ontology interrogates questions.

Thoroughness of thought is epistemological; depth of thought is ontological.

*

Thoroughness can be microscopic or telescopic: resolving into finer granularity of assertion or expanded topical breadth.

Depth asks of assertions “in what sense is it real?”

*

Each accomplishment of thoroughness raises new questions. This requires listening for questions, which is different from looking for answers.

*

When something hits a limit in depth, its expands in breadth. It splatters, pools up, soaks in, seeps out.

*

We sometimes say “going into depth” when we mean becoming more and more thorough on the same plane of questioning.