I have been having sporadic email conversations with Elliott lately and we’ve been talking about some interesting things. Particularly, he has some interesting things to say about thought and action. This topic has been of interest to me and I have blogged about it before under a different title of Theory & Practice.
Elliott writes,
… I quoted Bruce Lee from an interview he did on how martial arts are basically systems to connect the self with actions. He spoke about how thought is usually the intermediary between the self and action, and by creating a tool, a system, such as a martial art and learning to bypass thought and just act, people can be truly expressive of themselves and their true selves. I have definitely experienced this, not in any Eastern martial art i have taken, but in capoeira, which is a Brazilian “dance” comprised of attacks and defenses. I have always been able to tell a lot about someone’s personality by the way they perform in the Rhoda (sparing session).
This conversation reminds me of the anonymous quote,
Sow a thought; reap an action
Sow an action; reap a habit
Sow a habit; reap a character
Sow a character; reap a destiny
Thought and action/theory and practice/thinking and feeling, have been the center of debate and investigation for … a long time. In the design world, some frequent questions that rise again and again is, what is design research? Is it theory or practice? Do designers contribute to theory by their practice? Or is there a more deliberate way to contribute to design theory?
As Elliott observes, there is a distinction between method and art. In the design world, there is much talk of methodologies. In some ways, the heuristic evaluations, the focus groups, the card sortings are all part of this bucket. What if design were an art? Like the martial arts, with years of practice and habit, can design become second nature, beyond just a series of habits?
I remember Dick saying that in the Middle Ages, there were 3 or 4 core arts. I have them in my notes somewhere, but his mentor, Richard McKeon, really delved into the Middle Ages. Medicine was an art as was the study of law. Then there was also theology. People back then didn’t study specific categories of thought like we do today in our respective specialized professions. There is also the old form of architecture called architectonics … which was a generalized study of all sorts of things, a meta-design. These arts produced a different breed of intellectuals; I believe this form of education is what produced the da Vincis and Thomas Jeffersons in times past, people who were able to master a higher form of learning and “play” in any field of subject matter.
I am trying to read a book by McKeon called Rhetoric: Essays on Invention and Discovery as well as the Howard Fineman’s The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Define and Inspire Our Country.
Comments
7 Comments so far. Comments are closed.I’d say that art comes into the equation for anything that someone does often enough and understands deeply enough for methods to become second nature to them, creating the possibility for improvisation.
While habit is a part of this, the art comes in the understanding beyond methodologies to see the whole and formulate hypotheses. Design has that possibility of viewing the whole (problems, goals, and arguments) instead of the seeing only parts (which tend to focus on methodologies and tools).
Kyle, I like your mention of improvisation. I love it when comedians accidentally digress from their agenda because of something that is either triggered by the audience or their own train of thought and still make that part of the performance part of the experience.
Carrie has done some really interesting things in an effort to map the emotional aspect of a service journey with some of the work she did with IBM (http://thinkcarrie.com). She has also investigated the possibility of notating a service experience, much like the great composers would document their compositions. This, of course, is a challenge. However, I’ve been asking myself what if a service experience were like a jazz “composition”? Designers can be thought of as jazz musicians and true creativity can come with the flow of improvisations (Csikszentmihalyi).
I also wonder how deliberation fits into art because a good part of design deals with a piori forethought.
Taking Elliott’s metaphor, I’ve heard many martial artists talk about the instantaneous flow of punches and kicks they recall when situated in a heated and dangerous situation. Many don’t even recall what actually happened. One guy I know was about to get mugged in an alley way by 4 people. His mind went blank, as if everything happened in the twinkling of an eye, and the next thing he remembers is four guys all beat up on the floor.
So, I’m also interested in how much of a recollection of process is part of art? In design, at least at CMU, we’re anal about documenting the process so that one should be able to see the logical and emotional connections. But in many cases, an artist has the most difficult time articulating his/her process … in the case of the martial artist, there’s the possibility of blanking out in the moment of “artistic delivery.” Hmm … maybe the process is contained not at the moment of execution, but in the preparation. In the years of practicing and perfecting the form. If this is so, then an integral component of art is time. Now we’re back to John Dewey and his discussion of “development” and “arousal.”
Is 2 years of graduate school enough to teach the art of design?
I need to get a cup of coffee.
I realize this is a long time in arriving, but I would HIGHLY recommend you read Strategic Intuition by Duggan. He speaks a lot about how the improvisation happens and how it is different from other forms of intution.
Duggan uses military and martial arts examples as well as other great breakthrough moments in history and deconstructs how they came about.
Thanks, Kyle. I will definitely add the Duggan book to my list of must-reads
so here is something that has been on my mind for a while: how do we re-create this form of education? i remember dick talking about splitting education into rhetoric (creation), analytics (evaluation), etc, etc. aside from going off and getting a degree in rhetoric which might not be the best use of time for a designer, what practical approaches have you taken to systematically becoming a better creator aside from just practicing a process? this is actually something that i would like to push a lot further, so if your interested, maybe we should take this conversation to another venue.
Elliott. I think we have to make it a way of life. The problem is that my wife hates that I’m always talking about design
It’s because I talk about everything in terms of design cause that’s my system.
I think it helps to do some mental gymnastics to exercise the “art of design thinking” but try it on another subject matter. For example, I just posted on what it means to be an American. Some might see no connection with that and the design process, but I’m always thinking about different topics to stretch my range of creation/rhetoric. For example, I was thinking the other day what a “miracle” is. In the cross of pain, for example, someone at the top would view it differently than the bottom. For some people, a miracle is part of their reality. If you were a Jew leaving Egypt with Moses, the splitting of the Red Sea was part of your reality. To them, it wasn’t a figment of their imagination. Now, for someone like David Hume, he doesn’t believe in it. If it can’t be verified empirically and with numbers (laws of nature), he says that we should trash it.
When are you free? I was wondering what you meant by another venue. Are you going to be in MD anytime soon?
Or is your question, “How do we teach this type of education to others?” I took it to initially as a question for me – how I maintain or develop this art for myself.