innovation playground Idris Mootee

3 Paths Towards A Creative Life. It's Not The "Aha" Moments Or Being Perfect.

You want to be more creative? Sometimes it is not about trying harder to act creative. I see a lot of people trying too hard. Sometimes it’s not just about giving one the space to be creative.  Sometimes it is just being strategic. And sometimes it means apply a healthy dosage of common sense. 

Strategic creativity is more valuable than creativity.  Not everyone needs to be “creative” the same way as other think you should be “creative”. It is not about ideas. It is an attitude. Everyone can live a creative life and be creative how he/she sees live. It seems that when creative people (artist) with certain carft try to solve a problem or achieve a certain end result, particularly when the goal is related to their craft or specialized skills, they have an advantage. But when the problem is too big for them, it takes strategic creativity on a more sophisticated level.

Creativity is in such demand today and it is not the years of schooling or what art schools you attend. The word “Creatives” is used in advertising world to describe those who work on creating advertising campaign or providing craft for production. People in these roles like to believe that they are more creative than others. It is not the case at all.

Creativity is not a job title, crafts, capability or skills. Creativity is state of mind, which you can use in everything you see and do. People should live a creative life rather being creative. By living a creative life and having that state of mind, one naturally becomes creative. Creative is independent of discipline, culture and tools.

So how do you live a creative life? Here are three specific ways that can help you to live a creative life.

1. Be Bipolar. A little madness yield great artists, designers, inventors and scientists. The evidence is growing for a significant link between bipolar disorder and creative temperament and achievements. Seeing the extremes of both sides of anything help you to understand the spectrum of choices and options.  Go to places you don’t normally go and use that space. It is not available for everyone.
2. Be Foolish. Be lazy. Everywhere people are telling you rules and the right ways to do things.  Be acting silly and even lazy can sometimes help you to see easy paths to complex problems. Agatha Christie wrote, “I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention . . . arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.”
3. Be Strategic. Most people see this as the opposite of creative. This is total rubbish. Being strategic can also be creative. And being strategic you need to be very creative. The best strategists are often most creative people who can apply creativity in the context of a specific problem. They don’t’ dress in a funny way or even trying to act like artists. They may wear suits and even a tie, but they could also be the super creative types.

Creativity is not just about “aha” moments or interesting ways to look at things. Creativity is about putting empathy to work. Creativity is not about perfection. Weisberg and Csikszentmihalyi both talked the importance of motivation in creative performance. A notion of Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of creative flow is that reaching peak performance is “autotelic”, meaning it is enjoyable for its own sake. So the ‘creative person’ is simply someone who enjoys creativity and therefore does it all the time, even with no reasons and gains nothing from it. Someone just want to be creative all the time. That's different from peope who are strategic in applying creativity. Nothing good of bad. Just two very diffferent creative types.

Creativity is not about opening new doors because something said creativity people have no doors and doors are for those without imagination.

Thinking Usability Beyond Simplicity And Can We Really Afford Simplcity? Is Dieter Rams' 10 Principles Of Design Still Applicable Today?

Came back from beautiful Thailand speaking at the Design Is Opportunity event. Everyone is thinking about design not only as producing great products but also as a competitive advantage for creating new industries and as comparative advantage for countries. Met many people who are passionate in design and design thinking.

There are 16 remote controls that sit on my coffee table at home, and I have no idea what they are all for. It’s enough to make one think twice about turning on their phone, buying a new camera or downloading a new app. Looking around my surroundings, I’m struck with how overly complicated life is. Products that are supposed to simplify our lives now require a steep learning curve and possibly a special diploma.

Which leads me to wonder whether the concept of ‘usability’ means anything to designers and manufacturers anymore. Are they not concerned with alienating a large part of the market with their constant stream of complexities and change? Are they so sure that we’ll loyally follow them to the ends of the earth, syncing our lives to their products? Only a handful of companies are doing it right.

Usability springs out of a discipline called Human Factors, which has deep roots in military strategy. Crucial during wartime, when soldiers needed to design tactics to easily and accurately protect themselves while defeating their enemies. In the most intense and critical moment of one’s life, human factors mean the difference between survival and death. Many are confused over the difference between Industrial Designers (ID) and Design Engineers (DE), let alone between Industrial Designers and Human Factors Engineers (HF).

Industrial Design (ID) is an applied art whereby the aesthetics and usability of products may be improved. Depending which school of design you come from, you can be an artist or a designer that follows most if not all of the 10 principles of good design from Dieter Rams. Design Engineering (DE) on the other hand is a discipline that creates and transforms ideas into a product definition that deliver on customer needs.


The key difference between the two is: ID is an applied art, whereas DE is a discipline. This means that industrial designers' job is to dream up products and design engineers' job is to make it work. Dieter Rams is both a indistrial designer, artist and human factor engineer. He wants his product to be usefil, elegant and easy to use. Sometimes an indsutrial designer performs all three roles.

How did human factors come into design? WWII launched the starting point for electronic systems with user interfaces that were controlled by human operators. At the time, industrial psychologists like John Flanagan discovered that reducing the amount of clutter, such as buttons, switches and knobs on the control panels of aircrafts could dramatically improve operator performance. New models became increasingly streamlined, such as the P-51 Mustang fighter, “one of the conflict’s most successful and recognizable aircrafts.”

Aviation and weapons designers must consider a myriad of human factors, including how to prevent accidental firing, decrease use fatigue, withstand climate conditions, and equipment maintenance, to name just a few. Perhaps the most important factors that guide design involve the human condition. In short, the design must take into account those that will operate the equipment. The degree of automation and ease of maneuverability also play a role. Usability is all about transcending human limitations to achieve the upper hand.

The concept expanded when computers came on the scene. The evolution of the computer, from military technology to personal use, spanned many decades but it finally reached the hands of the public. For the first time, employees could have personal computers, but during this first introduction there were little to no instructions or guides. Despite this, software designers continued to assume that their users were knowledgeable and competent enough to understand the technical lingo and structure of operating systems to not only use the systems but also troubleshoot errors. Such implicit assumptions proved unacceptable, especially if computers were to achieve mainstream success. Today, we expect them to accommodate our limitations, intuition and even emotions.

Adapted from an article Usability Beyond Simplicity from the upcoming Sept issue of MISC- The Simplicity Issue which be available in newstand around the world in the third week of Sept 2012.

Design Thinking And Creating Social Capital. Here's An Example From Tampiquito, Mexico.

Creativity happens everywhere. Not only in design firms or creative agencies. And you can easily find the results of creativity all around you; you don’t need to seek out a gallery. People think creativity only happens in art schools and innovation don't usually happens only in a lab. Design Thinking and Strategic Creaitivty is all around us and funny enough many don't it Design Thinking. In fact, they happen more often than in a design environment. Design is not Design Thinking.

Creativity is everywhere and you need the eyes to see them. One example is PARK(ing) Day, an annual, worldwide event that invites citizens everywhere to transform metered parking spots into temporary parks for the public good. The beauty of these guerrilla installations is in their ability to engage and energize people. If all advertisers take 5% of their ad budget and use it for street installations, I think it would be a very valuable addition to their media mix. Imagine using this space for activation in creating social capital?

Meet Luis Alvarez who is an engineer by training and owns and runs a car repair shop, Autocity, in Tampiquito, Mexico. Luis also run an art gallery and an Artist-in-Residence program that aims to engage young local and international artists in projects for the development of the neighborhood’s social capital. Both the Gallery and Art Studio are located within his auto repair shop. Yes, people create art to the sounds of auto equipment and mechanics shouting, the entire process blends into a performance all its own.

It is a first for sure. And It brings me to the question, why doesn’t this happen in other spaces? In other places of business? What about shopping malls? This is one of the most creative ideas I’ve come across this year and I think Luis’ idea has legs. So far, two Artists-in-Residence projects have started up in Tampiquito. In 2009, the urban artist Eltono came to Tampiquito, stayed for two months, and painted the facades of about 50 houses in the neighborhood.

In 2010, Luis and his friends, El Narval, invited the Colombian sculptor Ana J. Haugwitz to join them. She also stayed for two months and worked together with the neighborhood’s craftsmen. The result was a collection of nine works of art, which were exhibited publicly in the neighborhood. Each work of art reflected the young artist’s collaboration with the talent she found in the workshops. I think art itself needs innovation more than anything else. It should get out of the studio and galleries and be part of our everyday lives. We can use a few more Luis in every neighborhood.

Do You Know The Difference Between Design Engineering And Engineering Design?

Went to the Made in Brunel opening last week, Made in Brunel showcases creations from within Brunel University’s School of Engineering and Design. The show was held at the Bargehouse, four storey building on the South Bank featuring an array of technological, sustainable, humanistic and virtual innovation concepts and prototypes.

Many wonder where the name Brunel comes from, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806 -1859) who was a leading British civil engineer, famed for his bridges and dockyards, and the construction of the first major British railway, the Great Western Railway; and a series of famous steamships, including the first propeller-driven transatlantic steamship. The school has a very good brand management program which is rare as a degree program.

There are a lot of work showcased in the Made In Brunel show and as always the quality of ideas varies. A few ones caught my attention including some concept explorations for Foursquare – the location social network by Chris Strickland, a graduate of product design engineering school. A number of mini appliance prototypes that allow people to play with information physically with their hands. By physically with the pods, people are able to combine different forms of content.

Foursquare Gaze has two components including the six Pods provide the interaction with up to the minute information and the Home which keeps the Pods charged and provides a safe place to store them. When each pod is taken away from Home, wireless connections ensure that they are kept up to date with the latest information. In this way the experience can be taken anywhere in the home.

Another interesting one is a concept to use physical items to manage utility costs at home (perfect for the modern couple) by Nick Sardar, a product design graduate. It is a physical interface (see photo below) where each cylinder is assigned to a financial aspect of your life. It is like open books household budget management.

There has always been confusions among people between industrial/engineering design and design engineering. And the same confusion applies to art school and design school which the lines are often blurred. Standford D-school was originally a engineering school, Brunel is an engineering school, Rhode Island is an art school, Arts Center is a deisgn school, RCA is an art school but certain grad programs are more like design engineering school. The lines are fast blurring. Many students are confused.

Here are what the definitions from Wikipedia but probably can use some modifications: Industrial Design (ID) is an applied art whereby the aesthetics and usability of products may be improved. Design aspects specified by the industrial designer may include the overall shape of the object, the location of details with respect to one another, colors, texture, sounds, and aspects concerning the use of the product ergonomics. Design Engineering (DE) is a discipline that creates and transforms ideas and concepts into a product definition that satisfies customer requirements.

The definitions of these two categories of design have a fundamental difference between them: ID is an applied art, whereas DE is a discipline. This means that industrial designers have more room to dream, immerse, create, interpret or expand an idea than design engineers to design everything that they or their customers want. And for design engineers, the job is explore material, heat, modularity and other engineering constrains and at the end is to make it work. Many are still confused as to which one does what. Even prototyping means very different thing for each of the two. Although in some cases the line is not clear.

Design Thinking Has Inspired Multi-disciplinary, Interdisciplinary and Trans-disciplinary Approaches To Problem Solving. This Is Just The Beginning Of A New Discipline.

Prague is mystical with a mix of medieval, Renaissance, and Art Nouveau architecture and the design scene is slowly taking shape. You still see traces of history of what communism had done to the city even after these buildings are completely restored. It is where Renaissance meets neo-Gothic and the baroque structures from the 18th centuries.

You can see shadow of cubist touches, which thrived in Bohemia more so in the neighborhood near Vysehrad Park. The public housing or “rabbit huts” as they called it, cheap but highly functional (the Walmart of architecture), provides a stark contrast to the Bohemia style. It is the featureless nature but with modern plumbing and heating were once considered the politically correct way to live. Or at that time, politically sustainable living as I would have called it.

I stayed at the Hotel Josef, a nine-year-old modern boutique hotel that was one of the first in Prague and still the most popular one. It is centrally located in the old Jewish quarter and right next to the Parizka Street. I don’t like the word boutique hotel, as it doesn’t mean much other than small and not part of a big chain. I rather use the word design hotel.

I was really impressed with the design and how it holds up over the years – now that’s design at its finest. There was not a thing to make you feel that it is getting out of fashion, in fact, the hotel design concept is to provide guests with a break from the fascinating baroque architectural surrounding the hotel and give them space to step back and relax in a soothing, and luminous environment. I enjoyed the hours and hours I spent sitting in the lobby lounge doing work with my Macbook while occasionally looking out the windows.

When you’re in Prague, you can’t avoid talking architecture. I’m not trained as an architect but always fascinated about the design process as well as the visual artifacts architect employs. Architects are considered designers and probably fair to say that they required the most rigor training both in art and art history compare to other design discipline such as graphic, fashion or industrial. They probably attracted a very different type of design mind than those of other design disciplines. I wonder what would happen if first year MBA students were required to spend 3 to 6 months studying the history of architecture and design, at the same time learning some basic drawing skills. I think that would drastically widen their perspectives as well as picking up some drawing skills that they can use for life.

Today, most MBAs can’t even draw simple diagrams. The pre-MBA studies are mainly statistics and accounting. There is plenty of time for accounting later in the program. The abilities to communicate using simple diagrams are extremely useful for business problem solving, strategic communications and visual sensemaking (strategic modeling and business model design). Architects use diagrams to explain their visions, elements and relationships between them. Business people can use abstract visuals to show business model options, new value chain design or customer interactions. Once business persons/design thinkers are supplied with visuals to making connections, they can see the relationships between different components better and in return easier to see something otherwise too complicated to express.

Visual sensemaking is quietly changing decision theory, it is also influencing design thinking and theories of design-oriented problem solving as a manifestation of pattern recognition. It is hard to say whether sensemaking is influencing design thinking or system thinking is influencing design thinking and in turn influencing sensemaking. It is a fact that design thinking has inspired multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary approaches to problem solving. I will explore the application of this in my coming Design Thinking for Creativity and Business Innovation seminar organized by the Harvard Graduate School of Design in NYC this month. 25% discount for early registrations and affiliates of a list of design and business schools. Now hoping on a train to Wien.

Design Thinking Is A Dynamic Constructive Process As Much As An Organization Culture.

I was visiting the biggest modern art gallery DOC (Centre for Contemporary Arts) in Holešovice, Prague. It was first opened in Oct 2008 and now going through some interior work and will be re-opening the other half in a week. It was developed by architect Ivan Kroupa and the idea was to reconstruct old factory buildings from the19th century and to build new ones interconnecting as an art gallery. It is like Idea Couture’s office in Toronto where three historic buildings were interconnected.

I am a big fan of contemporary art particular when it stretches the boundaries and interconnecting art, design, culture, media and technology. I am not an art for art sake person. I will add business to art, design and culture. That's what my magazine M/I/S/C is about.

The current exhibits include Petr Kvíčala’s collection of his older paintings and his Zig Zag Corridor paintings on the wall which creates optical effects on the big space – a 22m long corridor. Adding my pink shirt I feel like I am part of the exhibition. The newer works are more accurate or precise and resemble computer generated graphics guided by an algorithm expressible in mathematics.  He is probably one of the most popular Czech abstract painter and artist.  For the last 15 years, he has undertaken commissions for architecture-related projects which he collaborated with a number of leading architects both from the Czech Republic and abroad. The best part I like about his work was often the topics were initiated through rhythmical repetition of nature-based details.

Spent half a day at the museum and met some new friends there who were well connected with the design scene there, so I am thinking may be a future section for M/I/S/C magazine on Prague design.  But for the next two days, I need to finish my Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Design Thinking for Creativity and Business Innovation Program in three weeks. I need to start putting the lecture material together the next few days before I have to jump into another project and another.

Looking at Petr Kvíčala’s work and to some extent his paintings that are determined by the surrounding space, I can relate that back to Design Thinking. It is disappointing for me to see consultants that barely understand the core values of Design Thinking but quickly turn that into a product/process and oversimplfy it into a few phases including observation, visualization/prototyping and business design. This is Design Thinking kindergarten level and barely scratches the surface of Design Thinking.

Design thinking itself is a dynamic constructive process that is iterative in nature. It requires ongoing definition, redefinition, representation, assessment, experimentation and visualization. It is a continuous learning experience arising out of a need to obtain and correctly apply knowledge and insights to achieve goals that may change as more in depth knowledge of the problem and its context is acquired and new behaviors unfold. Here, prototyping and the creation of tangible “sharable” artifacts becomes an import piece of the design thinking tool kit. The art of what/when/how/why of prototyping is barely understood by these consultants. Everyone throw the word “prototyping” around without knowing the answers to the what/when/how/why at all.  What it is not a white board brain storming session sponsored by 3M sticky notes.

Design Thinking should be part of an organizational culture and can bring enterprise knowledge management to the next level. It helps to foster a creative intelligent culture that embraces questioning, challenge and discovery including frequent reflection-in-action, celebrating creativity, embracing ambiguity and visual sense making (interactions with physical objects as well as people). A Design Thinking organization creates strong “inspirationalization” and “creative bonding” to give tangibility to the emotional contract that employees that can have with the organizations.

Design Thinking Is Failed Experiment? How Can That Be Because The Experiments Have Barely Started? Bruce, Not Too Fast!

This is my response to Bruce Nussbaum’s lastest Fast Company’s blog declaring “Design Thinking” is over and that he is moving on to something new. He is calling it "Creative Quotient" which is really his new book, I was wondering why he would make that statement. People hardly fully understand what Design Thinking is, now he wants to introduce another idea. Not too fast! I was writing this while waiting for the airport to clear as President Obama Air Force One was there and they closed down the runway.

Bruce writes “The decade of Design Thinking is ending and I, for one, am moving on to another conceptual framework: Creative Intelligence, or CQ. I am writing a book about Creative Intelligence, due out from Harper Collins in fall 2012…...”

He can move on but for sure but not me (Sorry Bruce, I really can't agree with you on this one.)  Although there is some truth there about consultants quick to turn any ideas or practices into ‘processes’ that companies can buy out of a box and consultants can help them implement in 60 days. Most of the time they don’t even know what they are doing. Even if they do, they often ignore the soft side with an over emphasis on the hard side. On that note, the comment is equally true if apply to any practices. Processes are important and that’s how large organizations function, it is easy to say let’s improve our creative quotient throughout the organizations and we will be fine. For me, Design Thinking is much getting more solid that ever as we develop them further into business practices and if fully integrated in the organization culture decision-making and support toolkit, it can be very powerful.

On the other hand, “Creative Quotient” is like saying let’s is more creative. Sometimes I wish I could detach the word ‘creative’ from ‘design thinking.’ I know I cannot, but design thinking is not all above creativity. There is a lot more than being creative. When Bruce suggested that the success rate for design thinking processes was very low. I am not sure he can make that statement. It is like saying the success rate for strategic thinking processes was very low. We need to look at the maturity lifecycle of how it is implemented and to what extend it is embraced my organizations and well as aligned with the company’s business strategies. It is large small change effort, not a quick process redesign. Let’s wait for at least five to eight years to make that conclusion. A case in point, it took the academics and the business community more than 25 years before someone publicly declared the “Death of Strategic Planning”.

The increased adoption of multidisciplinary approaches to business problem solving and including the application of “Design Thinking” (but not exclusively) helps organizations fill a critical and often over looked knowledge gaps and solve some of information deficiencies. Problem. By combining the two organizations establish more comprehensive and ultimately competitive bodies of actionable knowledge and insights that reflect and avoid from pitfalls of linear strategic planning. This approach does not discount or diminish the value of traditional business methods in problem solving– rather – by leveraging the best qualities of both business and design thinking- it establishes a more sensitive, powerful and potent analytical tool and resulting in a more holistic perspective and learning experience that is meaningful, valid and agile.

"Design Thinking" is here to stay. “Design Thinking” allows us to provide a systemic response to the challenges that we all face. Not designing bandages or tactics that ultimately create more problems than they are designed to solve. “Design Thinking” brings empathy into the core of strategy making and allows rapid decision-makings with insufficient data, which is where most people structure with in innovation.

“Design Thinking” also has a positive effect on changing organizational culture – reveals and introduces new behaviors and challenges people to communicate and learn in new ways – while empowering them (through the adoption of tools, techniques, and culture) to think differently. But this is NOT the “Design Thinking” they teach in design schools. So don’t be confused.

The world of MBAs likes the quantitative assurance even though they know it is just a false sense of confidence. Microsoft Excel is only marginally more accurate than a crystal ball or tarot cards. I’ve seen many smart MBAs struggle with innovation be in the process or the problem identification and solving approach and most of all they don’t understand very core values of design thinking. This is why innovation is so hard for management consultants. Equally it is hard for the designers waving their banners saying ‘design thiking here’ and what they are selling is raw creativity or cute ideas or prety designs. Not solutions to wicked problems in an increasing complex world. We have enough buzzwords, there’s no need to introduce a new one. Let’s stick with “Design Thinking” for now.

Where Can You Get The Best Design Education These Days? Here's My Ranking. Is There A Good Place That Teaches D-Schools+B-Schools Thinking?

I've spent a good half-day in London at the Royal College of Art this week and lunch with Nick Leon of Design London. We exchange views of design thinking and the world of design and where it is going. Also met with some other faculties and plan to feature some of their work in the upcomming issue of the M/I/S/C magazine. Will write more on this next week.

Design thinking can power up strategic business innovation and change design education, but no one can agree on how to teach its methods. It is not exactly a very good time to be graduating from design schools as thousands of graduates pour into the job market this year and many industries are still in a flux. But the positive side is design is gaining importance in business probably the first time since the early days of the industrial revolution.

There are reasons to be optimistic but also concerns. I’ve interviewed about 30 designers/job applicants the last two weeks and come to the same realization that most of then are not equipped for the real world. Many design schools are struggling to find the balance between craft and thinking and some schools have not idea of what real world skills they would need. Lacking in formal and rigor methodologies is a still a challenge; some still resist the idea of needing a methodology. There are plenty of designers out there, industrial, graphic, architecture, urban planning, interactive (not enough information and service design) and definitely not many design thinkers. It is easy to assume that coming out from a design program one must be a design thinker. Not true at all, it is definitely not the case.

You don’t need to study in design school to be a design thinker, many young designers graduated with aspirations to use design to drive change and realized they are just in the business of communications – a poster (even a really good one) don’t change the world. “Design for Social Change,” sounds exciting, and when I ask them “How?” I usually get 5 minute of dead silence.

Everywhere graduates are emerging from new interdisciplinary graduate programs that integrate art, design, technology, and business. These young men and women are supposed to be trained in "design thinking." but mainly are just new ways of pushing creativity rather than thinking about new ways to solve problem. They are two very different missions.

Some schools simply bring students together from different schools or departments and allow them to do some cross-disciplinary project work. Example would be the exchange program hosted at INSEAD for Art Center students to take MBA courses for 4 months. INSEAD students can study with the design students in the eight-week 'Strategies for Product and Service' elective, offered through the 10-month MBA program. 

To train people in truly D-schools meets B-schools, the Royal College of Art is way ahead of the game in terms of training design thinkers of tomorrow. I would say this is the best graduate level design thinking education you can get today, compare to anywhere in the world. The Master's in Design program from IIT (Chicago) is also worth a mention for those who prefer wind than rain.

The Cox Review: Creativity in Business was commissioned by the UK Treasury to look at enhancing UK business productivity and resulted in the forming of Design London, an international centre for interdisciplinary design led innovation that teaches, researches and delivers radical new practices, tools and processes to transform the way organizations innovate. Design London brings together creativity and expertise in design from the Royal College of Art, engineering from Imperial College's Faculty of Engineering and the business of innovation from Imperial College Business School.

It was the first and still one of the very few schools where design is a core component of every MBA students curriculum, not just an elective course, and where MBA students, postgraduate students of design from the RCA and engineers and scientists from Imperial complete a common program which includes executing challenging innovation projects over several months.

I was excited to hear from Nicolas Neon at the RCA in London what they are doing there and it is almost exactly how we want to train our people at Idea Couture. I think this is the model where other schools should replicate.

Since RCA only offers graduate (Master or Doctorate) programs, if you want to have a good design foundation, here are the lists of best design schools in US and UK for you to consider (there are many good ones outside UK and US and I don't know enough about them):

UK Top Ranking Art and Design Schools 2010 ratings (Source: Guardian Top 10 list)

• No.1  University College London
• No.2  Oxford
• No.3  Brunel

US Top Industrial Design Schools 2010 (Source: The Idris Mootee's ranking) Stanford is considered more of an engineering school rather than industrial design school and that’s why I did not add it to the list, you can add that to the list probably as one of the top three. And then I have two No.3s)

• No.1 Art Center
• No.2 RISD
• No.3 Carnegie Mellon
• No.3 Pratt Institute

Officially Launching The First And Only Design Thinking And Innovation Magazine - M/I/S/C. Available In 18 Countires. Now Reviewing Proposals For Foreign Language Editions.

Great lacunch party last night for M/I/S/C, second launch party in San Francisco in a few weeks..and then Shanghai. 200+ cool people showed up. Food is good..and the cupcakes too. Special thanks to the folks who pulled this off in such a short time..Ashely, Lucy, Marla, Sherry, Jessica, Christian, Brooke and a few others... great job! The food was great, food catered by Caplansky's Delicatessan, speciality bite-size cupcakes by Cutlepiecupcakes. Speical thanks to Umbra for hosting us. Let's do another one soon.

I was once a "magazine junkie"; now after rehabitation I am now a very selective reader or not having the luxury for not being one. I cut my magazine subscriptions from 105 periodicals a fewyears back to 10. I have to cut one if I want to add a new one (I learned this from someone...). So it will always be 10.

Last year we’ve seen the changing hands and closing of some of the most prestige and long established business magazines including Business Week and Newsweek and some new one such as Portfolio which I find the positioning odd. So people ask me if I am crazy or foolish publishing another new magazine.

I am kind of both I guess. I think there is a future in magazines, but it won’t be like the old one. I love Business Week, but it is not a sustainable business model. It is an educated-consumer read: venerable, timely, credible, respected, well packaged and produced. Which is another way to say, in new media: slow, old, closed and expensive to produce. And it is still based on an old publishing model.

Newsstand sales for the almost 500 consumer magazines in the US measured by the Audit Bureau of Circulations have been on a steady decline last three years between 8-12% for consumer magazines. Many publishers didn’t make it through the rapid decline in advertising dollars and struggling with integrating with the Internet thing. And the iPad thing turned the publishing upside down and changing the game quietly.

I have been having problems with mainstream publishing anyway so I don’t see this as an entirely bad thing. The whole thing about “culture of mass media” or “popular culture” is moving our society backward or at least stopping us from moving forward. Let's take the "mass" or "popular" out of "mass media" or "popular media". Just look at what magazines they are selling at Walmart and you understand what I am talking about.

To some extend it is the same case for TV. JTV and JP (Junk TV and Junk Publishing) are hurting us and thanks to the Internet, many of us can do without TV and same for these poorly produced magazines. Many don't worth the trees they killed.

What is M/I/S/C magazine? I came up with the idea one night flying redeye. I said to myself I am trying to pick up what Bruce Nussbaum left behind at Business Week. I really like that supplement when he was the editor-in-chief of that section. 

Inpsired by Nussbaum's vision, M/I/S/C will be a new global media brand designed to take over when he left unfinished at Business Week, the mission is make design thinking and innovation practices accessible to a broader readership; the magazine will be positioned on newsstands alongside the other cutting-edge cool titles such as Monocle and Fast Company. I can't name another cool magazine, there are a bunch of good design and architecture magazines and not much that gets me excited. Bring me back Industry Standard, not sure if anyone remember that short-lived one. 

M/I/S/C is basically organized around four key concepts: Movement / Intuition / Structure / Complexity, M/I/S/C blurs the boundaries between business, innovation, design, technology, art and culture. I want to show the world we can produce a world-class product in 30 days with limited resources. M/I/S/C will always be in Beta. I never promise you a finished product, there wont' be one.

Theodor Adorno said it right, "Standardization, moreover, means the strengthening of the lasting domination of the listening public and of their conditioned reflexes. They are expected to want that to which they have become accustomed and to become enraged whenever their expectations are disappointed and fulfillment, which they regard as the customer's inalienable right, is denied, and even if there were attempts to introduce anything really different into light music, they would be deceived from the start by virtue of economic concentration."

Actually Adorno's critique was not directed against popular culture per se, but the specific kind of mass culture produced under monopoly capitalism which our system is designed to encouoraged in order to get market power. Consolidation of industry that drives efficiencies also takes out the heart and soul of the culture business. Take a look around us and see how popular culutre media = junk.

Popular culture posses a threat to innovation by destroying niche and novelties and sensibility of micro-cultures, which are essential to innovation. Many of today’s mass culture was not ‘mass’, these mass culture was imposed from marketers and media owners rather than derived from the people. Is there something called "mass culture" or it is just the advertisers that liked us to believe that.

I need to get back to my day job and this weekend I will start looking at content for the next issue.  Now onto the next one – the Future issue. The future is exciting.

 

Can You Teach MBAs To Be More Creative? Or Can Creativity Can Be Taught At All? I Think So. Same For Making Good Cupcakes.

The picture above is the Valentine's Day cupcakes Sarah Yoon (an IC designer) designed and produced, limied edition and no photoshop. Yum. I am happy to discover that many of our folks have talents outside their work and formal training. One guy makes bowtie and another one makes coasters. I think it is important that people should possess an artistic craft outside of Adobe CS5 and Power Point.

As the Harvard B-School’s MBA class of 2010 celebrated their graduation outside Baker’s Library last summer, they were listening to speech by John W. Coleman (also a member of the grauating class and getting a joint degree from the Kennedy School). Lots of talk around the need to think outside the box and be creative. I always wonder how much more creative you can become before and after B-schools.

I think generally speaking people are less creative post B-schools as they pick up more management concpets.  “As we cross the stage tomorrow and step out into the world beyond this school, what if it’s more important than ever to recapture that child-like sense of imagination?” Coleman said. “What if, in a world so vastly transformed by crisis that it barely resembles the one we left in 2008, what matters most is not Excel proficiency or accounting acumen, but a passion and capacity for creativity?” It is very true, the question remains what do you need to do? May be start with cupcakes.

Not many B-schools, if any, treat business creativity seriously (let alone they understand what it means). Even No.1 schools (three years in a row) like London Business School, there are nothing in the curriculum that teaches students to be creative. What they have is a Centre for Creative Business, a not-for-profit joint venture between London Business School and University of the Arts London, which exists to educate and equip creative industry (TV, music, arts and film etc.) management teams, that’s very different from applying creativity in everyday managerial capacity.

In today hyper-competitive cut-throat business environment, creativity in business is really the most important capability. I am interested to know how many MBA and other Master programs are teaching the personal AND professional tools of creativity and methods for applied creativity in problem solving? Telling students to think outside the box is one thing, being able to teach them how to think outside the box but within a bigger box is the art – we all work with constrains. This is where design thinking comes into play.

The second biggest challenge is teaching them to be creative but also a good team worker. Creative people are generally speaking not good team worker. I get pissed every time people try to tell me “I come up with the idea!” and I wished I have taped the session and play them back where the idea actually came from. Being creative AND collaborative is another big bridge to cross.

And the third one, B-school profs struggle to understand creativity, let alone teach them. There is no point sceamibng out-of-the-box thinking and then talking about compliances and accounting policies. I am 100% sure that we can teach creativity (which I've done for decades), once you get slightly above an average I.Q. and a resonably interesting person (I cannot help you if you are a super boring person, there may be a medication for that but I am not sure). I can teach you applied design thinking. Intelligence and creativity are not directly correlated. So you could be a genius and display little creativity or have fairly average intelligence and wield artistic talent and amazing creative powers.

Creativity is a learned behavior. I can teach and train people to be creative. But I cannot teach style and taste. Buying a Chanel cupcake doesn't mean you appreaciate one. That’s a different post another day.

A creative manager needs to have the courage to try new things and risk failure and understand calculated failure. It is like understanding there is a chance your parachute will not open and have a spare one. The not-so-strategic creative types will end up dropping from the sky without a parachute, the strategic creatives know how to handle risks and also understand the risk/reward relationships. They are not interested in doing crazy thing with no reward or knowing the reward is not big enough. These strategic creative people are innovators.

What Creative People Can Learn From Jazz On Time and Rhythm Management. There Are No Reasons Why A Creative Person Cannot Also Be A Professional.

I was talking to a publishing veteran from New York and showed him my new magazine M/I/S/C which will be in stores this week in US and next two weeks in 18 countries, he loved it and believed we have a winner here. Then he asked me how big is the team working in this and for how long? I quickly answered 4 people including me and all part time and it took 4 weeks. He looked surprised and said it would have taken him 5-6 full time people for 6 months to produce one issue, he couldn’t understand how we could move that fast. I said that’s the speed we operate. He was very impressed.

One thing that many creative people don’t understand, they assume that 1/ they are as the only individual tasked with coming up with the ideas 2/they have all the time in the world 3/they are thinking of something that no one has thought of it before. All three are wrong.

I don’t believe any good ideas come from one person (rare exception). It might be sparked by one person but immediately followed by other people’s ideas and then the idea begins to take shape through dialogues. It is easy to think that an idea come from one individual but that's never the case.

Then when given a task or problem to solve, they would assume that it is the only thing they do and then the world stops and wait for them to come up with the answers. Sorry, the world continues to move forward while you spin. Some design schools are very good in teaching people to spin than to produce.

And then the last one is it is simply a foolish notion to think that whatever you come up with has never been considered before. It is not out there doesn’t mean no one has come up with the ideas. It is like the first time a kid visit Disneyland and everything there were new, only to them. Most of the characters have been around for decades. I’d like to talk more about the second one in this post – time management. This is the worst one.

Time management is common among for us who are in the business of ‘ideas’. For most creative folks, being organized, having defined objectives and some structure seems to threaten their creativity and take the mystery out of the box. There is no mystery. They hate to be bound by time allocation and don’t know how to manage it. That’s why project managers are needed. It shouldn’t be the case, but they have become the necessary evil. The project management role is critical dealing with complex co-ordination of multi-disciplinary teams and technology projects, but less in the creative process. It is not the best use of their time to manage creative folks in the early phase and creative folks should understand what ‘deadline’ means. I think it is unfair that their lack of self-discipline continue to be a burden to others and other has to accomodate it. A creative person can be a professional. I don't buy the artist BS.

So how can creative people improve their time management? The truth of the matter is that focus and self-discipline is vital to the creative process. I know many world-class design thinkers who are also excellent time managers – from architects, urban planners to industrial designers.

Creative people’s main challenge is they don’t have the habits of planning ahead and very bad is dealing with interruptions. These interruptions and the many tasks at hand stand to eat away their productivity and their discussions often steer them to other out-of-scope areas. I am saying you should have a calendar with time allocated by the hour. You need to think like a play producer. There will be a time you need to rehearse whether you finished the script of not and there will be time when audience start entering the theater whether you’re ready or not. And you can’t ask them to wait outside.

The best way to deal with this is to compose a task list and manage the task list like you manage a jazz session. It is a time process as well as a creative jamming process. Understand who plays what role and make sure it is sticking to the rhythm. Be prepared for these jamming and make sure you have the right people. Jamming with the wrong people is a waste of time.

First, know what I call your "power time". It's important to know what time of day you are most alert. This is high value time and treats it as such. Use a good portion of this time to work on your most important assignments. Each person has a best time. You can discover yours by monitoring your productivity over a period of time. Then you need to manage your schedule to keep your best time free for your most important work.

When planning your day, set other times of the day for tasks that don't require as much of your energy and concentration. Know what time of the day is least productive for you and use those time for other non-creative tasks such as prioritizing things that are important but not urgent or cleaning away your admin stuff or expense report etc. Assign a time to read you email (other than the urgent ones) and randomly spending time on your inbox can detail you. And don’t go to YouTube, do that at night. YouTube is the number one time-stealer. Your time in the office should be about interactions; otherwise you should be working from home. Always keep a notebook (or a piece of paper in my case) handy so that you can quickly jot down things that need to be done or your to-do-list. This will keep you focused on what you are doing and keep those things that need to be done in front of you.

Time (or rhythm) management is a skill badly needed for anyone who is in the knowledge business and particularly for creative folks. Here’s a take away for you - six steps to creative productivity:

1. What's the job? - Generating a long list of perceived problems or opportunities relating to the project and to select only the key "problems" to address. Invest your time smartly.
2. What’s the learning curve? – Understand what is needed to get up to speed and it is need to be proportion to the project time. You can’t spend 7 days learning a project and only have 2 days to work on it. Learning should be no more than 20% of the total project time.
3. What's the deliverable? – Think like a consultant, think deliverable, think about the end product not only what they look like but how they will be used.
4. What's the Information we have to work with? – Think about what information you will have to work with and what do you know and what you don't know.
5. Who's Involved? – Need to know who are your team mates and their individual role.
6. What's the rhythm? – Remember to set up the rhythm and get everyone into it. There is a lot you can learn from Jazz. As Jazz rhythms tend to be syncopated, meaning they contain unexpected accents. 

In addiiton to Jazz, it is important to understand the concept of swing, which has to do with creating a sense of momentum and danceability (good ideas dance). Some styles of jazz make use of counterpoint, which occurs when several melodies with different rhythms are played simultaneously. Together, the attributes of syncopation, swing, and counterpoint create a rich rhythmic background that is one of the most important elements of jazz. If you don’t like Jazz, you can’t be a good productive creative person. Hip-hop is the opposite and not recommended.

Art Is Like Viagra For Science. Art And Science Complement Each Other In All Forms Of Sense-Making. The Magic Formula For Innovation.

“If you’ve never been lost you’ll never end up getting anywhere new”. That was a great opening line when Dan Widen tried to sum up his observations on day one of the event. It was the first time I met him in person and I must say I really like him. Not only of his achievement but his personal style of reflections. Also met with his colleague John Jay, also a great guy and honestly I was a little surprised to see them at the event, a nice surprise. I was expecting to meet with only scientists, artists and policy makers.

The STEM to STEAM workshop was hosted by RISD and funded by the National Science Foundation, the idea is to bring together thought leaders to come together to develop strategies for enhancing STEM education through the integration of Art and Design thinking. "STEM to STEAM pedagogy integrates a broad range of learning methods and learning ecologies from the empirical studies in the science lab, constructive critique in the design studio and creative discoveries in informal learning settings," according to Dr. Pamela L. Jennings, Program Director, Computer and Information Science and Engineering, National Science Foundation. "Creativity and rigor are rewarded and STEM learning in formal and informal settings is transformed from 'we have to learn' to 'we want to learn'."

On my flight home, I was thinking, what is the difference between an artist and a scientist? Or the artistic process and scientific progress? This was the closing discussion we’re having on the second day of STEAM. It is never easy to have scientists and artists (I don’t know which group I belong to, I am a management scientist and an artist) sitting together to talk about the integration of art and science. There is no question that there were differences in opinions in terms of what’s the definition of an artist?

The commonalities seems to be that both requires extreme curiosity, certain expertise, experimentation and ability to deal with unknowns, and using various methods of inquiries etc. And the key differences the science progress requires validation and repeatability (other wise it is not a science experiment). On the other hand art can often be done as a one off. Art is more process oriented and science has more consideration for the outcome or goal-oriented (there are also a lot of science research that I don’t know what they’re trying to achieve). The process (may be process is not the right word) of art requires artists to deploy observational skill which allows them to see beyond the surface, recognize what the eye sees and interpreting them as they see it, and constantly experimenting with organizing colors, textures, patterns, shapes, space and form.

Artist is best in asking question and sometimes these questions seem to be irrelevant they are trying to make a point. And when art is applied in science, it is becoming part of the scientific process, it is a powerful subjective aid in enriching the objective world of scientific evidence. But when science is applied in art, suddenly it has become the “rapid prototyping of truth.” Instead of algebra equations and statistical charts or applying Multivariate Statistical Process Control when several related variables are of interest are collectively known, we can make a powerful piece of visual that brings all the data together added with a subjective richness to help viewers to see things otherwise they may not see. Art is like Viagra for science (or even for scientists) to help them to keep up with the crazy world out there.

Another interesting idea is for several decades, investigations into consciousness has always been a muddy area in the scientific community. Artists and designers have always believed that art can impact our phenomenological experience of the world - via our central nervous system - through artistic stimuli, which thrill, question and captivate, for centuries. The sensations from art, whether it comes from an art installation, a painting or a digital simulation can help us to experience the immediacy of the things happing (whether it is 50 years ago or now around us) and provide a truly phenomenological experience of our world. And thereby open a T1 connection into our consciousness.

I know a scientist/artist that uses her knowledge gained in biology to explore relationships between cellular form and function and she was showing people amazing visuals of how the double helix structure is telling us what makes us who we are – an example of science meets arts. When art infuses into science opens up possibilities for artists that have the scientific knowhow to use scientific knowledge to create works of art.

I must say I very much enjoyed the event and I had the opportunity to meet with lots of scientists and artists and a lot of great discussions about the value of crossing over. Art and science provide a complementary way of making sense of the every increasing complex challenge around us, it allows data to have emotion and help us to see (and sense) the past and future. A healthy dose of subjective enlightment can give scientific knowledge a richness and depth beyond that which our senses can perceive. They complement each other in sense-making which is really the comprehension of meanings, and projection of our future. And science cannot do it alone without art.