Design Thinking

Design Thinking - from ideo.com.

I went to a presentation at CCA Thursday by Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo. The presentation was structured as a conversation between Tim Brown and Mark Breitenberg, CCA's Provost, who himself has a record of leadership in design. In the talk, Tim Brown plugged his new book, Change by Design, which I haven't yet read.

During the talk, Tim Brown and Mark Breitenberg frequently used the term Design Thinking. It is a fairly new term to me and I didn't really understand what they meant by design thinking - at least in a way that distinguished it in my mind from thinking on the one hand or design on the other. I did hear lots of descriptive words - prototype, experiment, build, iterate, change, collaborate, reflect, observe, or analyze. In the end, though, I realized design thinking is a misnomer. What emerged (consistent with here and here) is that design thinking is not a type of thinking, like, say, analytic thinking or creative thinking, but rather it is a label for a methodology or process model, like the waterfall or spiral methodology. Design thinking is a shortcut for referring to the process that designers typically follow.

My first response was to wonder: in these days of interdisciplinary teams, how is it helpful to adopt a label for a team process which privileges one discipline over others? Design thinking hints at hubris. It is liable to lead to turf wars. I imagine non-designers seeing this as a branding tactic that positions the designers as the source of cool.

Next, I thought: it is a clever label. Designers are cool, after all. So this methodology must be cool too. And because it involves thinking it must also be smart, in the same way Adidas shoes are intelligent. What could be better? If I had to pick between, say, "human centered design methodology" and "design thinking" I know what I would swing for.

Clever labels are not necessarily good ones. I'm reminded of George Orwell's great essay on Politics in the English Language. Orwell notes that language is full of tired metaphors that people use automatically and without thought. He argues that we should always seek out fresh metaphors that evoke clear images and assist thought. As a metaphor, design thinking is fresh and appealing. However it is far from a clear image that assists thought. Quite the opposite, design thinking is so vague and sounds so good that people (myself included) immediately want to use it regardless of what it actually means. The result is a cacophony of claims. We learn that design thinking is "what all the creative people do", or it is "about innovation and creativity." It is "a human centered systems thinking that enriches life." "Design thinking converts need into demand" writes Tim Brown. Design thinking is the change agent that will lead us to a better world, where complex problems are addressed in a transparent, inspiring, transformational, participatory, contextual, sustainable way.

Design thinking has grown to become far more than a label for a process. It is a movement, a group of people sharing a vision for how to make better things. Coming from the software industry, I've seen similar movements there, all aiming to overlay some kind of roadmap over the chaotic moshpit of innovation. Scrum, extreme programming (xp), test driven development, agile, ... I could go on. Coders are a vanguard of process innovation. They are also in the unique position of being able to build software tools to assist in and instrument these methodologies. You could argue (eager as I am to use the term) that coders have been applying design thinking to the problem of software design for 25 years.

What have we learnt? That we haven't finished yet. The core of the problem is that innovation involves building things that haven't been built before and thinking things that haven't been thought before. To innovate you have to leave the map. Methodologies, on the other hand, always produce a map, structuring what innovations are possible. Methodologies only help innovation to the extent that the map they produce doesn't get in the way. In other words, the team using the methodology must realize that it is not the methodology that innovates. Design thinking does not think in exactly the same way that Microsoft Word does not write. Thought takes place in the complexity of dissensus, where we leave behind labels like "designer", "coder", "user" and "product".

Ultimately, it is about what works. In software, I've seen teams that adopted rigorous methodologies only to crash and burn, and teams who followed almost no methodology who then thrived and excelled. In my experience the methodologies that work best are those which start with modest claims and a lightweight infrastructure, provide a barebones of management scaffolding, and then slip into the background. The more sophisticated, complex, ambiguous, ambitious or vague the methodology, the more steps there are, the more room there is for debate about the methodology itself - all of which is time taken away from getting it done.

Will design thinking stick? It is probably too early to say. But, even if we question the label, or wonder at the efficacy of the methodology, we should agree with the intent of design thinking: our goal is to expand human-centered approaches across our organizations and companies. Meanwhile, back to the moshpit.

LED Lighting

Flexible LED lighting from Elemental LED

My friend Bob referred me to Kick Lighting and to Elemental LED. They both sell LED lights on flexible rolls that can be powered with 12v. I haven't quite figured out what to use them for yet, but I was really impressed by the sample Bob showed me. The LEDs and control circuitry are mounted directly into a flexible circuit strip. You just tape it up somewhere, plug in 12v and you have light. You can get small power dimmers too.

Avatar 3D

Zoe Saldana plays the warrior Neytiri in "Avatar" (from NYTimes)

I went to see Avatar 3D IMAX today (NYTimes review here). It is the best visual smorgasbord I've seen in film in a while, with an astonishing level of attention to detail, especially in the nature scenes. The film takes 3D visual effects to a new level. I loved the flora and fauna, and thoroughly enjoyed this aspect of the film. However, ultimately the film left me disappointed.

The story contrasts a dystopian military-industrial society with a utopian primitive-natural society. The military-industrial society consists of entirely bad guys, people out to exploit purely for profit. Meanwhile all of the natives are constitutionally good - there are no liars, cheats, thieves, cowards, drunks, slobs or lazy aliens. Straddling these two, a tiny group of heroes must decide where to take a stand.

The two societies collide and then bounce apart. In the end (spoiler alert) the men with their machines exit, and the heroes join the "noble savages" to return to their graceful state in harmony with nature.

This is a massive rewriting of colonial histories, one that pretends we can close pandora's box and return the gift of fire. Bring back the Dodo, let the natives win, Cameron suggests. Nice idea. Of course, we know the men with machines will be back with bigger guns and better bribes. And at least some of the natives will discover they have more leverage if they switch from warriors to miners and traders. Isolationism is only a temporary solution.

We expect nostalgia and fantasy from Cameron, whose previous films include Titanic and Aliens. Cameron's films rely on binary oppositions, on WW2 narratives of good and evil. But today these binary oppositions seem faded and naive. We crave stories that embrace the both-and world of globalization and post-colonialism. We want characters who deal with the gray slushy middle ground of issues like integration, assimilation, control, and liberation. Avatar's making is a case in point - the film's astonishing 3D visuals are only possible because of technologies born out of the military-industrial complex the film aims to critique. We live in the circular, the meta and the post. Our stories must live there too.

The criteria of curating

Fridericianum - site of Documenta (link)

I went to a presentation at CCA by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, curator for the next Documenta. Erudite. Talented. Charming. Her talk made my blood boil. Carolyn claimed that she does not "select" artists for her shows. She repeatedly rejected that word. "Addition" she said, "I work through a process of addition, not selection." She said she adds artists in a way that is very chance driven, through random encounters that would lead her to work. Her shows, she claimed, were formed in this happenstance of accumulation.

I appreciated Christov-Bakargiev's effort to distance curating from the image of an all-knowing judge who selects the best work with a kind of pre-planned foresight, like a scientist performing selective breeding. But her model of chance-based addition presents its own problems. The word "add" is suffused with positivity. It glosses the unavoidable: the calculus of curating is far more subtraction than addition, since there is always less space than art. Curating inevitably involves rejecting some artists that would otherwise fit because there are other artists who otherwise fit... in other words, selection. The word "add" projects mathematical neutrality, not the shopper adding products to their shopping basket. And the idea of a curator of Documenta who "randomly" discovers artists struck me as very optimistic about the neutrality of chance. Invite a curator to your art school, pay a stipend, and see if the curator perhaps randomly meets some of your MFA students.

I left the talk hungry for criteria for curating that escape the toxicity of pluralism, without resorting to Iron Chef. Then I remembered that I'm an artist. Thank goodness I don't have to worry about that.

Aethetics after the Postmodern Turn

This public symposium looks like it will be really great:

Saturday, October 17, 2009, 9 am
Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus
1111 Eighth Street, 9:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

A select group of philosophers, art historians, cultural critics, and artists examine the status of aesthetics in discussions of contemporary art. What can the discipline of aesthetics, with its roots in the 18th and 19th centuries, contribute to the analysis of contemporary art? What role do philosophical ideas play in creativity? What can reflection on feelings of beauty and sublimity contribute to studio culture?

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

9–9:30 a.m. Coffee & Continental Breakfast

9:30–10 Welcome & Opening Remarks
Joseph J. Tanke
Mark Breitenberg, Provost
Rachel Schreiber, Director of Humanities and Sciences

10–11 The Identification of Aesthetics and Politics in Rancière
Emiliano Battista, Jan van Eyck Academie

11–12 The Case of the Aesthetic Regime
Joseph J. Tanke, California College of the Arts

12–1 World Modernisms: The Case from Indian Modern Art
Pradeep Dhillon, University of Illinois

1–2 Lunch

2–3 New Games
Pamela M. Lee, Stanford University

3–4 What Is Art?
Frederick M. Dolan, California College of the Arts

4–5 Aesthetic of the Cool: The Life and Times of an African Artist
Robert Farris Thompson, Yale University

5–5:30 Short Break

5:30–6:30 Keynote Address
Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art
Alexander Nehamas, Princeton University

Looking at Art

Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times Visitors at the Louvre: some engage directly with the art while others take pictures of pictures.

Back in August, Michael Kimmelman wrote a piece in the New York Times titled At Louvre, Many Stop to Snap but Few Stay to Focus. In it, Kimmelman argues that few people look at art slowly any more. He observes:

"Almost nobody, over the course of that hour or two, paused before any object for as long as a full minute."

He then goes on:

"At one time a highly educated Westerner read perhaps 100 books, all of them closely. Today we read hundreds of books, or maybe none, but rarely any with the same intensity. Travelers who took the Grand Tour across Europe during the 18th century spent months and years learning languages, meeting politicians, philosophers and artists and bore sketchbooks in which to draw and paint..."

Needless to say, according to Kimmelman, today we have lost something compared to earlier times. But his comparison is bizarre. He compares an earlier "highly educated Westerner" with today's general readership ("we"). His highly educated Westerner can only have been an ultra-wealthy gentry, since in Victorian times high-brow books cost far more than most could afford. One book of Wordsworth's poems cost as much as 100 pigs, for example. Meanwhile, we (the rest of us) read voraciously even then. Miners in the 1920s are documented reading 80 books a year on average. Not the 100 classics that Kimmelman refers to, but far more populist fare. In other words, plus sa change...

What irks me most about Kimmelman's article is that his main claim is that we don't look carefully anymore - but what he actually demonstrates is that journalists don't report carefully any more. Kimmelman makes no attempt to back up his opinion with any scientific research, cultural or social studies, consultation of experts, referencing of scholars, citing of statistics etc. In short, he practices precisely the kind of intellectual skimming he derides in art lookers. This is simply journalism on the fly. The difference between Kimmelman and his target, the lazy art tourist, is that he is writing front-page articles for the NYTimes.

(As an aside, many of the arguments from Krugman's article on Horse Race Reporting apply here).

Do people look at art more rapidly today? To answer that, we would need to know how long the average art goer spent in front of each artwork in previous decades. As far as I am aware, this data does not exist. They didn't use closed-circuit TVs in museums 100 years ago. Anything we say must be speculation.

There is a deeper problem. The "we" that we are talking about has changed. Art audiences have risen dramatically in the last few decades. For example, the Tate Modern is the second most visited destination in England today. That is a lot of eyeballs. Do we look at art differently? Or is it instead that different people are looking? What was a fairly self-selected group of serious art lovers has become "diluted" by a more diverse group of people visiting museums for many reasons. In other words, perhaps the apparent increase in people wandering around museums casually is not a cognitive change in our visual attention, but simply a reflection of a broader and more diverse population of artgoers.

These questions are beyond Kimmelman, who prefers unsubstantiated statements. He writes "Cameras replaced sketching by the last century." Which is like saying "TV replaced radio by the last century." It sounds good. So does my radio, by the way, which works great today. Sketching is still with us. Is it any more or less "normal" than it was 100 years ago? Again, answering that question in a meaningful way requires far more of an investigation than Kimmelman provides.

Kimmelman identifies the digital camera as the enemy of looking. Is that really the case? Why not target postcards, also? After all, they too enable art visitors to think "I won't bother looking, I can always buy a postcard." The argument about digital technology is inconclusive at best. Clive Thompson in Wired Magazine recently wrote a profile of Andrea Lunsford. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford. She recently conducted a survey of over 14,000 writing samples and concluded that, rather than killing writing, technology has created "a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization." I can think of no reason why Lunsford's observations would not also extend to the visual.

Upcoming- Fall 2009

This autumn is beginning to look quite full. Besides teaching at CCA I have three art events:

Overlap

I have a piece in Overlap, a group show at Elga Wimmer gallery. Here's the info:

Overlap - Extending beyond edges and boundaries in art & architecture
August 27 - September 19, 2009 (Tuesday - Saturday noon-6:00pm)

Opening Preview: Thursday August 27th 5:00-8:00pm
Opening Reception: Wednesday September 9th 6:00-9:00pm

Art and architecture are often portrayed as distinct, even opposing fields, though they share many material and conceptual practices. The invited artists and architecturally trained designers share interests in generating forms, pattern, and geometries through tactile material processes -whether hand crafted or through the use of computational technology. They often incorporate an awareness of codes or conceptual layers in their work as well as new generative methods and modes of production. The intent of OVERLAP was to begin with these commonalities, and provide space for indefinable qualities to emerge, hinting at something new.

The participants in the show are 4-pli/Associated Fabrication, John Monteith, Jon Meyer, Kelsey Harrington, Myles Bennett, SOFTlab, THEVERYMANY, yo_cy, and Ziad Naccache.

Curated and produced by Kelsey Harrington & Christine Yogiaman

Governors Island Art Fair

I will be installing Farm Yards stickers on September 5th during the afternoon at Governors Island in New York, as part of the Governors Island Art Fair.

The Governors Island Art Fair - over 150 artists

The art fair is open weekends, September 5-27, 11am-6pm. See here for more information on visiting the island.

San Francisco Open Studios

I have a new studio in San Francisco, and will be participating in the San Francisco Open Studios, October 24 & 25, 11am-6pm. My studio is at 900 Tennessee, unit 18. Here is a flickr set of Unit 12, which is quite similar.

New York to San Francisco by train

Hudson valley, taken from the train. The slanted tower is caused by the iPhone's rolling shutter.

I took the Amtrak train from NY to SF. Three days total on the train. And spectacular scenery - particularly after Chicago, when we reached Wyoming and Nevada. I went coach class for the first leg of the trip, from New York to Chicago. Then I splashed out on a sleeper room from Chicago through to SF. I'm glad I had a sleeper - the moment I settled into my little sleeper room, I shifted from travel mode (watch the bags, stay on alert) into vacation mode (relax, put my feet up, stop worrying, read a book...).

My general impressions: The people on the train were great, the views were amazing, service was generally good, the food was so/so, and the Amtrak carriages have seen better days - for example, the toilets broke in my carriage, which was no fun for anyone. That said, I would take the train again, if I had another space three days.

Click here to see more photos.

Super magnets for putting up artwork

Here's a cool technique for mounting flat paper-based works to a wall:

Basic technique:

1. Drive a flat-headed nail into the wall until it is flush.
2. Place the paper against the wall, over the nail
3. Put a neodymium disc magnet on the paper, over the location of the nail. It will stick to the nail and pinch the work, holding it against the wall.

This technique easily scales to larger works:

More nails: For large-area works (e.g. 40"x40" or more), place a nail about 1" in from each of the four corners. For wide works, use 3 nails along the top edge. For long works, place a nail in the middle of each vertical edge.

More magnets: If the work uses heavy paper, you can stack up 2 or 3 magnets over each nail to increase the pinch pressure.

You can buy neodymium magnets from a number of household goods stores - the Container Store calls them "mighty magnets". Some hardware shops sell Magnetsource.com magnets, which come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They are not too expensive - less than a dollar a magnet - and they are reusable.

Ward Shelley showed me this technique. It has several advantages over the pins, clips or tape:

• You don't have to be super-precise about the location of the nails. Once you have the work up, you can "slide" it, moving each corner so it slides under the magnet. I place a level on the top edge of the work and adjust it until it is level. This is much more tolerant than working with pins.
• Unlike clips or pins, the magnets leave almost no impression on the work - I've found I can put up a work and take it down and not see any mark where the magnet was. Unlike tape, there is no risk of tearing.
• The magnets are unobtrusive and have a more minimal look than pins or clips.

The one downside is that, when the work comes down, you have some nail holes in the wall, instead of pin holes. In most art locations this is no problem, because the walls are patched and painted all the time. In a home location, you may want to stick to pins.

Will it happen?

I have a piece in a group exhibition curated by Kelsey Harrington called Will it Happen?

Elga Wimmer Gallery
Opening: Tuesday August 4th 6-9pm
526 West 26th Street #310 New York, NY 10001

Then August 5 – August 15th, 2009, Monday-Friday 12-6 or by appointment

Artists:
Rory Baron
Myles Bennett
Ginny Casey
Ama Saru & Hsiao Chen
Ghost of a Dream (Adam Eckstrom & Lauren Was)
Rachel Frank
Laura Greengold
Kelsey Harrington
Amanda Lechner
Jon Meyer
Anna Mikhailovskaia
Ziad Naccache
Yuka Otani
Antonio Serna
Eduardo Terranova
Bohyun Yoon
Brian Zegeer

ELGA WIMMER PPC is pleased to introduce the group exhibition Will it happen? as part I of two summer shows, produced and curated by Kelsey Harrington. Hours are Monday to Friday from noon to 6pm or by appointment.

The title for this show, taken from an artwork made from lottery tickets, asks a question about the future. The exhibition features a selection of artworks that are representative of current studio practices. Rather than adhering to a preconceived strict thematic curatorial agenda, the work was selected following an open framework. The idea was to juxtapose works from a range of artists and find potential connections. Reflecting on the collected works, several themes emerge. One theme echoes the kind of anxiety or uncertainty embedded in the show's title, which could also be what will happen? or will what happens be good? In many cases, the artists manifest this anxiety via the figure, which is seen as misshapen, fragmented, operated upon, escaping, or simply missing. Another theme is a reliance on invention, free play and intuition. Above all, there is a continued investment in material and formal concerns. It is almost as if the artists have responded to uncertain times by becoming more heavily invested in making and material.

In association with StudioFuse artblog, studiofuse.wordpress.com.

For further information please contact Kelsey Harrington 401.316.4303 or (kelseyharrington at gmail).

The Gallery @ Elga Wimmer, PCC
526 West 26th Street #310 New York, NY 10001
t. 212.206.0006 c.401.316.4303 Monday-Friday 12-6 or by appointment