What Do We Mean By "Innovation," "Collaboration," or "Design"?

A FastCoDesign blog post from last week about the importance for designers to acknowledge truth and recognize your broader audience: http://goo.gl/mZeW8

Ray Kroc once said, “If you're not a risk taker, you should get the hell out of business.”

Love it.

A little research tells us that risk ”concerns the deviation of one or more results of one or more future events from their expected value.”.  What’s interesting is that, “technically, the value of those results may be positive or negative. However, general usage tends to focus only on potential harm that may arise from a future event, which may accrue either from incurring a cost or by failing to attain some benefit.”

General usage?

When did we all get so... general?

Ray Kroc was an innovator. Current fashion would call him a designer. However we describe him, he saw an opportunity in a field of possibility, and acted on it. That opportunity led to enterprise at a massive scale. And it’s that scale, for McDonald’s, and for all companies of a certain size, that has dictated ‘general usage’ of the word ‘risk’.

It’s easy for designers to warn these sorts of corporations that they should take more risks. But there’s no need to be so cut and dry about it. In fact, that general usage isn’t such a bad thing sometimes. Parents understand this. Life with small children is a constant play within the upside and downside of risk. Too much risk is just physically dangerous. Too little is emotionally dangerous in the sense that no child benefits from too sheltered a life.

With kids, the constant challenge is to establish a field of possibility that permits a healthy dose of risk within a framework that promotes safe exploration. The paradox is that the line between safety and danger is no line at all. Rather, it’s a gradient. As parents, we try to set up this exploratory space so that it’s challenging but stops short of being dangerous. And sometimes the only way the kid will really learn is if you let her fall down once or twice.

It’s pretty much the same thing for designers. We constantly seek to put ourselves into a space of discovery that has inherent risk. In any creative process, in order to increase the chances of discovering ‘the big idea’ we have to set up an interplay between rational and intuitive thinking that is inherently undependable. It’s a deep acceptance of risk. But in this case, the risk has mostly to do with the chance that you never get to that big idea, and you’re left with an unhappy client. All we can really do is set up the conditions for this discovery that increases our chances of getting there.

We try to set up this gradient zone, a sort of silver cloud. Full of possibility, but ethereal, mercurial, with soft edges. The ways to create this space of exploration, the silver cloud, are endless. But there are a few basics characteristics:

Information Rich: The silver cloud is a space of diverse information. Some of it familiar, some of it reaching out from that familiar information and into new areas of knowledge. New knowledge feeds the cloud, makes it more vibrant, and begins to form new connections within it. Often, the best information is from related, but different fields. The work of Olafur Eliasson may hold the answer to a business strategy for a fortune 100 company, if you can find the insight.

Simultaneous: The cloud is, ideally, a physical space that serves, literally, at first, as a blank canvas. The more you can post all of your explorations in one single space, the more likely you are to see connections between things through the duration of the process.

Rational-Intuitive: The silver cloud oscillates between rational process and intuitive acts. The intuitive synthesizes large amounts of information, the rational assembles it in a way that is understandable and translatable to others. The distance between thought and expression should always approach zero. Sketching is best. Fidelity becomes important only when expressing the ideas to broader audiences who aren’t a part of the development process.

Static-Fluid: In the context of design practice, the silver cloud should be static and fluid. It should have a home base, but it can live anywhere. That means mega-post-its in a boardroom that get translated to a keynote file, printed and posted at home base. Converted to a pdf for wide circulation. Hand written notes. Smartphone photos of quick sketches. Whatever works! Aggregated and synthesized into coherence. It has to maintain a certain looseness, or the rationalization cannibalizes the creative possibility.

Green: Most important there has to be an element of green in the silver cloud. A green lining maybe. Ray Kroc also said: “If you’re green, you’re growing. If you’re ripe, you’re rotting.” The process of discovery inherently resists the tedium of expertise. Expertise tends to be a default condition. Maintaining an element of green is a real challenge.

You tend to know when you’re in the silver cloud. Things seem easier there. Ideas flow. It’s like the eye of the storm. For the rest of the time, you’re in the thick of the cloud, searching for the center. But once you get there, possibilities unfold and the big idea floats into view, undeniably right. Like the most mouth watering cheeseburger you’ve ever seen.

If there’s one thing to know about design, it’s that it rarely goes where it’s supposed to.

Well, more accurately, the outcomes are rarely specifically what you may have expected them to be at the outset of the work. In fact, you know you’ve gotten to real success if what you end up with is pretty far away from what you thought you’d have at the beginning.

Here’s an example.

We were working on a project for the Innovation Centre for US Dairy this past year. It’s a new group tasked with the gigantic project of moving the entire dairy industry in the US to more sustainable forms of practice.

Our job was to design a booth where the Innovation Centre could show their progress at the World Wide Food Expo in Chicago.

We were in direct competition with several other exhibition design firms. The chances of our winning the project were, to be honest, weak. We have experience doing that kind of stuff, certainly, but while we’ve designed many many spaces, we’re definitely not exclusively an exhibit design company.

But Erin Fitzgerald, our main client, wasn’t interested in an expert. What she wanted was new ideas. And that’s what we’re good at.

It took some time for Erin to convince her team that it made sense to choose us. It’s a position we often find ourselves in. Do you go with the proven experts or unproven amateurs? Well, it all depends on how you look at it. I like to think that we’re unproven experts in just about everything. What we’re expert at is getting to a big picture idea of what the real issues are and coming up with the best possible way to a clear and engaging answer.

It turns out that there was more to the project than just the design of a booth. It was a visibility project. We had to develop an overall strategy to get people involved that saw the Expo as simply one event in a longer trajectory towards broad community involvement. It was a project that had, at its heart, an exhibit booth, but really, it had to accomplish a level of engagement with the dairy producer community and begin a broader conversation about sustainability.

We weren’t quite sure what the booth would look like when we started the project. But if we had, we would never have had the opportunity to discover the big idea: Cow manure!

Through our process of very specific and targeted research about the industry and the initiatives that they had underway, we discovered a new material: Manure based fibreboard. That’s right, 100% cow manure.  It very quickly became obvious that the entire booth HAD to be made of the stuff. And not just the booth, but also the printed things that we had to send out beforehand and all the signage at the show. John Hunt, a government researcher in Madison, Wisconsin, had been developing the material and agreed to let us try to use it to make everything from paper to thick board-like materials.

Now, was the process risky? Might we have never made it? Depends on how you look at it. Is it riskier to show up with the same off-the-rack design as every other organization at the event, pretty much guaranteeing invisibility?  I tend to think so.  There’s a certain spirit that we find to be alive in all of our clients.. This acceptance of the risk at the promise of deep reward in doing new things.

I remember one particular phone call with one of the members of the US Dairy team where she was quite concerned that we wouldn’t make our deadline. After a heart to heart we both agreed that such were the sacrifices of such a project, and that, in the end, it was worth a few more hours of stress to do something truly different and remarkable.

And, in the end, I like to think it was just that. There was a lot of activity and great discussion over the few days. One of the harder things to do at events like that is draw people into your space. I have to say, it was with some pleasure that our opening line went something like this: Guess what? This booth is made of poop.

At our studio, our work can be wildly diverse. It’s not uncommon for us to have strategy related projects happening for Fortune 100 companies at the same time that we’re working on experience design projects for NFL teams and logos for small social entrepreneurships. There’s no better way to see the underlying patterns of design than to work across this kind of diversity. And I can make no statement more certain than that there are patterns that lie deep at the heart of all creative enterprise.

First is the art of telling the truth. I’ve memorized one poem in my life, by Emily Dickinson. It goes like this:

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---
Success in Cirrcuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---

It only becomes more meaningful the more I learn about design. It hasn’t been uncommon for us to develop an absolutely killer idea only to have it die at the hands of an unprepared audience. Five years ago, if we’d presented a recently developed concept for an exhibit booth made entirely of cow manure (as we just did for the US Dairy Board) we’d likely have been shut down immediately. What we’ve learned, is that half the art is in telling the truth, but telling it slant. The lead up and the context is a critical piece of the work. What I’ve found to be the single most powerful idea in creating open and receptive minds is to introduce radical ideas in an open and receptive way. If there’s ‘no way into’ an idea for the audience, then they’re more likely to cross their arms and look for alternatives than to stay receptive. There’s theatre in truth, like it or not.

Now, you still need the ‘Lightening’. The best set up gets you nowhere without it.

The second pattern involves increasing the likelihood of a lightning strike. We often call that moment of insight ‘magic’ and simply wait for it to arrive, but there are simple patterns that we can follow to at least increase the odds that ‘Lightening’ will strike. And I’ve found that that moment of insight comes from pretty much the same head space no matter what the type of project. I do believe, though, that it’s deeply rooted in language. And the best way to accelerate the trip into that little magic spot in your brain is to wander with purpose. The best outputs come from forays into new inputs. A little devoted time spent reading about something that one finds both pleasurable and informative opens up the territory for creative development like nothing else. Combine it with the right physical setting and the probability that you’ll hit on something worthwhile goes way up. But it’s not a treasure hunt. You don’t read the solution. In reading, you sort of open up a space that hovers in your mind above the written word and allows the ideas being read to swirl and eddy. If it sounds wishy washy it’s because it is.

The third pattern involves the ability to shift gears. When in the creative development mindset, there’s nothing more important than deferring any and all judgment. But once the time comes to present the work to the person you owe it to and who has asked for your expertise, you have to know how to shift gears and become supremely confident that there’s no better solution than what you’re presenting. The reality is that, as a designer, you ALWAYS believe that there’s a better solution, but the people who trust us enough to pay us to find creative answers to their questions are best served if you spend the time to deliberately and methodically explore the full spectrum of possibilities with passion and purpose. They pay us for a period of thought, after which they want the reassurance that you got to the best possible place that you could. It never helps to let them in to the torture you face as a designer knowing there’s always a better version of every single answer you can possibly come up with! If you’re good, the best answer is the one you found, whether you had 20 minutes or 20 years, and your client needs to be assured of that. Not to say that brute certainty is the best way forward in every instance, just know when enough is enough.

And you will.