innovation playground Idris Mootee

Design Thinking And Minimalist. Not Waterd Down Simplicity But Blending Style And Simplexity.

I have always admired the work of Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garçons ( French for "like boys") designed by Rei Kawakubo. Both are similar and very different. Both operate at the intersection of fashion, art and architecture and it so happened that the output is fashion. I am a big minimalist fan although my lifestyle doesn't allow me to become one. After twenty years, I am still working on it. I am hopeless I guess. I am often distracted by other things and hard for me to stay true to it. May be this is the time.

I think this is the perfect time for minimalist thinking to become mainstream, not only in style but in minimlaist design thinking. We have been over thinking about many things. Most products are overdesigned and our life is overcomplicated. We want less and not more. And I am not talking about a watered down voluntary simplicity or sacrificing style or substance.

True minimalism is an highly intellectual exercise and a state of mind. The practice of minimalism is still primarily reserved to a small group of people in fashion, architecture and art (and i-bankers). I am in favor of mass adoption of minimalism as a philosophy. A simpler lifestyle and less complex.

I visited the lastest Yohji's exhibition at the Albert and Victoria Musem in London last week. A very small exibition but still worth visiting. His work is characterised by a frequent and skilful use of black, a colour which he describes as 'modest and arrogant at the same time. He is famous for his white shirts with subtle design. He believes that black is the only genuine colour (and white) and it's his essence.

The exhibition space houses about 60 creations and a multi-media timeline which reveals Yamamoto's wider creative output. Central to Yohji's work are the textiles. ‘Fabric’ he said once ‘is everything’. Each one of the fabrics used in his collections are made to his specifications by different craftspeople in and around Kyoto in Japan.

It seems the minimalist movement is making a comeback. The Japanese minimalist movement, which radicalised and democratised the fashion world in the early 1980s is creeping back and making a scene. Yohji needs to go mass. There is a stuborness for any haute couture house. His company filed for bankruptcy in 09, struggling under six billion yen (£40 million or US$65 million) of debt. I think Yohji needs to think out of the (black) box and reimagining about applying has philosophy and lifestyle outside fashion. I love to write more but have to go back to writing for the next issue of my magazine M/I/S/C. I am a week away from editorial deadline. 7 days a week is not enough for me, I need at least 12.

 

The Past You Can't See, The Future Is For You To Imagine and Shape. Welcome To The New 'Future' Issue of M/I/S/C Magazine.

Here’s the Jun issue of M/I/S/C which will be coming out in newsstand in a week. This will now be available in 22 countries outside of US, Canada and UK. We’re so happy with this issue and I always thinks the ‘Future’ idea is always an exciting one. As Terri Guillemets puts it “The past can't see you, but the future is listening.” I always find it fascinating when I see a magazine cover featuring something about the future – technology, economics, design or anything.

I have been speaking with many senior executives recently on future and strategic foresights. They were so excited when I showed them how we bring strategic foresights into their planning process and how we can show tangible futures.

Our strategic foresights approach is both rigor and unique and very tangible. It is the opposite of some dream up scenarios and random visions by armchair self-claimed futurist. Let me remember the future is not an end state. Tomorrow will someday be today, which will fade into yesterday. As our world moves through this unyielding passage of time, how people act in our world will determine just which of many possible futures we end up with and how our imaginations, actions and open-mindedness can shape a very different and more positive future. Given how little we know about it today.

What do we know about the future and what’s considered useful information to help us understand the future? The “easy” and only certain answer is simply that the future will be both dramatically different and yet pretty similar. Not only we don’t know about the future, we know how little we know about the human mind and human behavior. As the proverb says: “Every 100 years, all new people.” Now every 20 years I suppose.

This new issues you will no longer find me writing every single piece of the content, I have invited numerous contributors that enriched the content but without losing a voice. This issue we are also featuring a number of Royal College of Art / Imperial College graduate students and their work-in-progress as well as a number of future oriented innovative ideas from the MIT Global Challenge all are working towards solving some of the world’s most wicked problems. For the special feature, I will let you find out yourself, it is a piece that I collaborated with Mat Lincez and Ricky Thomas which I hope you will like.

I am in London the next two weeks and will be working on a client’s site but thinking about the next issue - the “Customer Experience” issue. I have no ideas what I want to do exactly on this one. I think I will figure out in the course of the next few days or hours. And for the cover, will be casting for a cover girl and shoot the next cover in London next week.

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.