via en.wikipedia.org
I'd like to watch this, it comes highly recommended and looks really interesting when you see things like this:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/china-business/7929938/Foxconn-faces-fresh...
Sunday 3 October 2010
Friday 1 October 2010
Kids are the best design-thinkers
Tim Brown's TED talk was all about how play is a key ingredient for creativity to flourish. One of the great ways he demonstrated this was by asking the audience to draw a 30 second sketch of the person next to them. Of course everybody was embarrassed by their efforts, at how ugly or strange they made their neighbor look. The point being that if you do this experiment with kids, they don't feel the slightest embarrassment. They don't have the pre-conceptions or societal constructs that we become constrained by as we get older. They have no fear of failure.
The video clip above is from a recent documentary on the BBC - one of the 'Imagine' series with Alan Yentob. This episode - 'Art is Child's Play' was all about how artists - the creative purists of society, strive to maintain a child-like innocence in their art. I forget the name of the artist (can't find the full vid online), but one of them was talking about how being true to your art, especially in today's world, is a case of trying to shut your ears to all the voices that are telling you to do something different, that it won't sell, that you're stealing ideas, that you should do what your client likes...
I had another reason to think about this today. My wife told me how Isaac (5) had commented on a workman breaking up the pavement. I guess he'd seen a pneumatic drill on Bob the Builder, so he asked why the guy didn't use 'a drill thing' to make it quicker. My wife said it might be because those things are so noisy that they don't really use them any more (you don't seem to see them in Holland where we live, but I think that's more likely because the streets are mostly un-mortared bricks lying on sand). So Isaac thought, and then asked why they don't use some sort of thing to stop them being so noisy, like a tent. On the face of it, that sounds kind of stupid, and not the kind of suggestion that 'grown-ups' would make. But why not? Even if the tent idea doesn't end up being feasible, there are probably other spin-off ideas that could end up reducing noise pollution from building sites. I'm sure there are inventions waiting to happen there. The most entrepreneurial thing he said though, which I am sure would impress Peter Jones, was about potential names for this thing (I was discussing it with him at this point). He didn't like the idea of calling it a 'Pneumatic drill sound tent' or similar because it was too narrow an application (not his words). He thought it should have a more generic name, so that it could be applied to other noise reduction problems. I'm obviously biased, but that seems pretty smart to me. Did I mention he's 5? It must be my wife's genes...
So a huge part of design, or 'design-thinking' - which is debated to much at the moment, is bringing a creative, open-minded and questioning approach to business or societal problems. I don't think it means that designers should think they can suddenly solve all business problems (a great article on Core77 about this and the 'T-shaped designer'), but it does mean bringing something that traditional business strategists might not have - the ability to ask the dumb questions, to make the crazy suggestions which might lead to something big. Richard Saul Wurman was talking at the 'Why Design Now' conference today (I was watching the live stream). He says rather than selling knowledge, he sells ignorance. No-one knows everything, every problem is different. The best quality to have is an acceptance that you are ignorant, and able to lay fresh eyes on the problem space. We grown-ups like to think we know a lot, but maybe we'd be better off focusing on how little we know.
When we are no longer children, we are already dead. - Brancusi
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