Comments on: Not Method to Madness, but Method to Art

By: Kip

Kip — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 17:50:41 +0000

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.

By: Kip

Kip — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 17:24:11 +0000

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?

By: elliott

elliott — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 22:02:08 +0000

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.

By: kipthinks

kipthinks — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 23:27:00 +0000

Thanks, Kyle. I will definitely add the Duggan book to my list of must-reads

By: Kyle

Kyle — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 12:24:00 +0000

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.

By: kipthinks

kipthinks — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:52:00 +0000

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.

By: Kyle Vice

Kyle Vice — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 12:50:00 +0000

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).