MindFool by Camila Nogueira

THOUGHTS ON CREATIVITY ISSUE 11 SPRING 2015 This month issue it’s all about creativity. Is it learned? Are we born with it? What drives us to create and be constantly innovating? “The feeling that the floor is always about to fall out from under you… does it ever go away? I don’t think so, and it probably shouldn’t. It is what keeps you moving. If you sit and think about it too long, you’ll think you can’t handle it. If you just keep moving, everything keeps working.” Andy Newman madebyandy.com/blog

CONTENTS

Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s creativity? Can it be learned?

Design Thinking

10 Lessons from The Creative Habit

The science of creativity

Finding the Creative Within

Understand, Visualize, Survive

Why do people hate brainstorming so much?

Linda Naiman

Twyla Tharpâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s

Meredith Alling

Tim Brown

Empirically backed tips to capture your nextbig idea. Amy Novotney

The importance of information design in a graphic design course. Max Gadney

The stages of creativity

What is young, talented and afraid of the dark?

Where ideias come from?

#The100DayProject

Art-based Learning

Arts-based teaching and learning activities

/ Read

The classroom level. Robin Rooney for the VSA Arts Washington, DC

/ Listen

Where Creatives work Culture is King

/ Watch

Maria Popova

Bob Hambly

Maria Popova

Linda Naiman

The process is the great surrender. Natasha Berting

Unlocking creative potential is key to economic growth. Linda Naiman

Sam Mcmillan

Creativity /,kri:eiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;tiviti/ noun the use of imagination or original ideas to create something; inventiveness.

What’s Creativity? Can it be learned? by Linda Naiman

Creativity is the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality. Creativity is characterised by the ability to perceive the world in new ways, to find hidden patterns, to make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, and to generate solutions. Creativity involves two processes: thinking, then producing. If you have ideas, but don’t act on them, you are imaginative but not creative. What about innovation? Innovation is the implementation of a new or significantly improved product, service or process that creates value for business, government or society. Some people say creativity has nothing to do with innovation — that innovation is a discipline, implying that creativity is not. Well, I disagree. Creativity is also a discipline, and a crucial part of the innovation equation. There is no innovation without creativity. The key metric in both creativity and innovation is value creation. Can creativity be learned? The short answer is yes. A study by George Land reveals that we are naturally creative and as we grow up we learn to be uncreative. Creativity is a skill that can be developed and a process that can be managed. Creativity begins with a foundation of knowledge, learning a discipline, and mastering a way of thinking. You learn to be creative by experimenting, exploring, questioning assumptions, using imagination and synthesing information. Learning to be creative is akin to learning a sport. It requires practice to develop the right muscles, and a supportive environment in which to flourish.

Your ability to generate innovative ideas is not merely a function of the mind, but also a function of five key behaviours that optimize your brain for discovery: 1 Associating: drawing connections between questions, problems, or ideas from unrelated fields. 2 Questioning: posing queries that challenge common wisdom. 3 Observing: scrutinizing the behavior of customers, suppliers, and competitors to identify new ways of doing things. 4 Networking: meeting people with different ideas and perspectives. 5 Experimenting: constructing interactive experiences and provoking unorthodox responses to see what insights emerge. Why aren’t adults as creative as children? For most, creativity has been buried by rules and regulations. Our educational system was designed during the Industrial Revolution over 200 years ago, to train us to be good workers and follow instructions. While the secret to unlocking creative genius remains elusive, research suggests that it’s possible to prime the mind for creative ideas to emerge. And creativity is even taught as an academic discipline in some places. So, what are the ways teachers are drawing out that creative spark? And should these techniques be taught more in schools? The belief that schools are failing to nurture creative skills has grown in recent years. Gerard Puccio at Buffalo State College in New York argues that it’s never been more important to arm people with the skills for creative thinking. “It’s no longer a luxury. It’s about survival,” he says. Industries rise when creativity thrives, and fall when it doesn’t.

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WHAT’S CREATIVITY? CAN IT BE LEARNED? • LINDA NAIMAN

What kinds of techniques are taught? Puccio teaches his students that creativity comes in four stages — clarifying, ideating, developing and implementing. Clarifying is ensuring you’re asking the right question; ideating is about exploring as many solutions as possible; developing and implementing are making sure the idea is practical and convincing to others. Of the four, ideating is perhaps the stage that most obviously involves innovative thinking. It’s here that the familiar brainstorming technique comes into play. The idea, says Puccio, is to force the brain out of a purely analytical state in which it tends to focus on one solution and ignore other options. A de-focused mind is more likely to make the unusual connections that just might suggest a novel solution to the problem. One of Puccio’s ideating methods is to ask students to brainstorm a problem and then present them with an object at random, insisting they find a way to connect it to the discussion. “It’s about forcing the brain to give up old patterns and search for new ones. That’s often what happens when inventors make a breakthrough,” he says. Scientific research supports the idea that certain activities can prime the mind to come up with less obvious solutions than would emerge otherwise. Psychologists call it “divergent” thinking. For example, Joydeep Bhattacharya of Goldsmiths University in London has shown that people in a relaxed mood are more likely to arrive at creative solutions when problem-solving. And another study by Australian researchers showed people are more likely to solve puzzles lying on their back than standing up. Perhaps it’s because when people are mellow, their wandering mind encourages them to review a diverse array of ideas, rather than get stuck in a more focused, narrow mode of thought.

A de-focused mind is more likely to make the unusual connections that just might suggest a novel solution to the problem.

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As well as teaching divergent thinking skills, Puccio also argues that successful creativity involves ensuring ideas are practical and convincing — the “developing” and “implementing” stages of his four-step approach. “Creativity is not a licence to be bizarre,” he says. So what does all this mean for schools? Should we throw out the textbooks and rote learning that are used to prepare students for standardised tests? Encourage children to let their minds wander rather than concentrate in the classroom? It’s easy to be cynical about some of the findings emerging from the study of creativity — although, as Nemeth’s work shows, discussing genuine problems while implementing these ideas in the classroom is probably a useful exercise. For instance, no one in creativity research argues that children should give free rein to their imagination at the cost of understanding a subject. After all, you can’t think outside the box until you fully understand what’s inside the box. But with 21st Century firms emphasising the value of creativity in their employees, it’s important that teachers are allowed to value the trait in their students too – which is something that today’s curriculums often discourage, says Puccio. It’s also important to note that these creativity techniques are not going to turn an average kid into a young Einstein or Picasso — everyone accepts that you can’t teach genius. It’s more about encouraging the day-to-day creative thinking that can make students and an adult workforce more productive. Puccio calls it creativity with a little “c” — and he’s convinced it’s a talent we all possess. “You’re human and you have an imagination, you are wired to be creative.” •

Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re human and you have an imagination, you are wired to be creative. ISSUE 11/ SPRING 2015

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10 Lessons from Twyla Tharp’s “The Creative Habit” Learn in and use it for life. by Kim Manley Ort

Twyla Tharp (July 1, 1941) is one of America’s greatest dance choreographers, with more than 130 dances produced by her own company, as well as The Joffrey Ballet, The New York City Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, London’s Royal Ballet, and American Ballet Theatre. She has been working in the creative realm since 1965, so it’s not surprising that she has learned a few things along the way. www.twylatharp.org

BEGIN YOUR CREATIVE PRACTICE WITH A RITUAL Tharp starts her day by taking a cab to the gym. She says that having a ritual makes it a habit and for her, getting in the cab is the first very important step. She needs to be literally warmed up to get creative and her time at the gym does just that. I always get up and make a cup of coffee while it is still dark — it must be dark — and then I drink the coffee and watch the light come. Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transition. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.

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10 LESSONS FROM TWYLA THARP’S “THE CREATIVE HABIT” • KIM MANLEY ORT

Movin’ Out (Tour) Fisher Theater, Detroit, 2004

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KIM MANLEY ORT • 10 LESSONS FROM TWYLA THARP’S “THE CREATIVE HABIT”

BE AWARE OF WHAT DISTRACTS YOU AND GIVE IT UP FOR AWHILE Being aware of what seriously distracts you is so important. Like fears, distractions can seem quite reasonable. I’ll just check this email. It might be important. I need to get the laundry started or there will be no clothes to wear tomorrow. I need to visit my grandmother right this minute, because my guilt is preventing me from doing my best work. If you get your important creative work done first, there is usually plenty of time to do the rest of it. This requires deciding what the important work is, and setting realistic deadlines for it. Tharp suggests eliminating your persistent distractions from your life — temporarily at least, and see how your work is affected. For example, give up TV or movies or background music, whatever is your biggest distraction, for a week. How does it affect the quantity and quality of your work?

Chalnessa Eames in a 2010 restaging — Afternoon Ball.

It might be a tool. If you’re a writer, it is probably a pencil and notepad. If you’re a painter, a sketchpad. Whatever it is, you need to take it with you wherever you go. Ideas can come from anywhere at any time, and you need to be ready. It might be a practice. You might get your best ideas from a daily walk or from solitude or from reading. It might be doing physical work or mundane chores. Know what works for you.

A company needs investment to make money. People need investment to make the most of their creativity. I know many artists who don’t feel that they can invest in themselves until they are achieving a certain amount of financial success. However it doesn’t work that way. The investment has to come first and at various times along the way. Tharp reminds us that money is a tool. Once you have your basic needs taken care of, the rest is up to you — to invest in yourself and/or others. Whether you’re putting money into supplies, or taking the time for a class or workshop, the payoff is usually much greater than the expense.

KNOW WHAT FEEDS YOUR CREATIVITY

INVEST IN YOURSELF

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10 LESSONS FROM TWYLA THARP’S “THE CREATIVE HABIT” • KIM MANLEY ORT

Twyla Tharp (1985)

We often think that to be creative you have to come up with something brand new, out of thin air; something never done before. Yet, really those brand new things are often just new ways of combining or connecting what has been done before. Tharp says, “Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them.” Scratching for ideas can seem like you are appropriating someone else’s work (which of course you should not do), but there is a subtle difference. Others’ ideas can serve as inspiration for your own. Tharp cites Harvard psychologist Stephen Kosslyn, in presenting four ways to act on an idea — generate it (from memory or experience), retain it, inspect it, and finally transform it. She suggests many ways of scratching for ideas, including reading, conversation, art, mentors and nature.

While courage is important in creativity, the spine we’re talking about here is the original thought or basis for your creative project. When you start to get off track, go back to the spine to help you stay on course. The spine might not be apparent to someone experiencing the final product. For example, one of Tharp’s dances, Surfer at the River Styx, was originally based upon the Greek tragedy, The Bacchae. With only six dancers, she couldn’t recreate the whole story, so she took the main theme — pride and arrogance — and developed a dance around that theme. No one would know that it was based on this particular Greek tragedy, but she kept it in mind throughout the process. For Tharp, the spine is a tool. It is not the message, but it keeps her on message. She suggests finding the spine of your creative work with the help of a friend or co-worker, through music, or by remembering your original intentions and clarifying your goals.

SCRATCH FOR IDEAS

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DEVELOP A SPINE

KIM MANLEY ORT • 10 LESSONS FROM TWYLA THARP’S “THE CREATIVE HABIT”

PREPARE TO BE LUCKY I love this one. As a perpetual planner, I have to realize that at some point, you just have to go for it. Live with uncertainty and see what happens. Recognize that your creative projects are not entirely your own. They need contact with the world to help them evolve. Tharp also advises that part of preparation to be lucky is to be generous with others. It’s that whole karma thing. She says, “Generosity is luck going in the opposite direction; away from you.” Pacific Northwest Ballet dancers in a 2010 restaging, Opus 111 performance

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10 LESSONS FROM TWYLA THARP’S “THE CREATIVE HABIT” • KIM MANLEY ORT

KNOW WHEN YOU’RE IN A RUT AND KNOW HOW TO GET OUT OF IT To Tharp, a rut is different from a creative block. It’s more like a false start. You know something’s not working, whether you want to admit it or not. This could be the result of a bad original idea, or bad luck, or sticking to past methods when new ones are required. To deal with it, the first step is to admit you’re in one. Spinning your wheels, or letting pessimism creep in, are signals that you’re in a rut. She suggests brainstorming as a way to come up with a new idea, and get past old habits. Also, challenging your initial assumptions and then acting on those challenges is another way. She warns against over working and over tinkering. Know when to stop for the day, always leaving something on the table for the next day.

BUILD YOUR VALIDATION SQUAD

JUST DO IT. IT TAKES A LONG TIME AND HARD WORK TO BECOME A MASTER AT WHAT YOU DO. There is no substitution for doing the work. Tharp presents a graph showing Mozart’s output over a 35 year period. It is similar to the work of many other masters in that output starts off slow (in the learning stages), hits full stride in the middle of their careers, and tails off a little as they age. Devotion, commitment, and persistence are required for a long and fruitful creative career.

When creativity has become your habit: when you’ve learned to manage time, resources, expectations, and the demands of others; when you understand the value and place of validation, continuity, and purity of purpose — then you’re on the way to an artist’s ultimate goal: the achievement of mastery. •

Every creative project needs constructive criticism along the way. Tharp suggests building your own squad of people to give you this important feedback. These people should be ones that you admire, that you call a friend, that are not competing with you, and that can be trusted to give honest feedback. We have to know how our work will connect with others and this can’t be done in a vacuum. Pacific Northwest Ballet dancers in a 2010 restaging, Opus 111 performance

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Finding the Creative Within by Meredith Alling

“Everybody has tremendous creative capacities,” said Sir Ken Robinson, the bestselling author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative, among other titles. His book explores the value of creativity, the ways that we stifle our true talents, and the need for a better approach to creativity in education and business. “You can be creative in math, science, music, dance, cuisine, teaching, running a family, or engineering,” Robinson said in an interview with ASCD. “Because creativity is a process of having original ideas that have value… It’s a process, not a single event, and genuine creative processes involve critical thinking as well as imaginative insights and fresh ideas.” Creativity as a process. That’s an important idea, and one that comes up again and again. Creativity is not just about having that “a-ha” moment (which we are all capable of ); it is about setting ourselves up to have that moment, then knowing what to do when it happens. Learning creativity, therefore, does not mean starting from scratch; it means unearthing and enhancing the creative intelligence that already exists within us.

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Gerard Puccio, chairman of the International Center for Studies in Creativity at Buffalo State University, told General Assembly that there are many reasons why he thinks it is possible to teach creativity, but highlighted three: “First, my own personal experience in going through creativity training. As a young man I was the poster-child for someone who was uncreative, had much more of an athletic bent. Through undergraduate course work in creativity, I was able to dramatically improve my creativethinking prowess. So personal experience. Second, as a practitioner, both as a trainer and educator, I have worked with thousands of people and watched their transformation as a result of creativity training. Finally, as a scholar I am familiar with the research that has experimentally tested the ‘trainability’ of creativity — and the evidence is conclusive. Creativity training has been shown to significantly improve creative attitude, creative performance, and creative problem-solving skills. The research has shown that those programs that focus on providing people with cognitive strategies (tools that enhance thinking) are the most effective. With that in mind, the International Center for Studies in Creativity uses a model called Creative Problem Solving. The core skill embedded in the model is the separation of idea generation from idea evaluation. Both are important, but generation must come before evaluation. Additionally, this model provides a comprehensive set of cognitive tools that run the full range of the creative process, i.e., tools for problem clarification, tools for idea generation, tools that help to transform good ideas into great solutions, tools to help sell your great solutions to others, and tools that help with create a viable action plan.”

MEREDITH ALLING • FINDING THE CREATIVE WITHIN

“Creativity as a process. That’s an important idea, and one that comes up again and again. Creativity is not just about having that a-ha moment, it is about setting ourselves up to have that moment, then knowing what to do when it happens.”

Of course, universities aren’t the only places helping individuals learn creativity. If you look at some of the most successful startups and businesses, they’re embracing creativity too. For example, at 3M and Google, employees are encouraged to take free time to work on their own projects. LinkedIn has a foosball table where employees can play and relax (studies have found that people in a relaxed mood are more likely to arrive at creative solutions; one study by Australian researchers even found that lying on your back can help you solve puzzles). And the global design firm IDEO swears by the finger blaster, a toy that looks like a tiny rocket and launches across the room with one pull of a rubber band. But does playing really enhance creativity? In his very entertaining TED Talk (Tales of creativity and play), IDEO CEO Tim Brown shares his insights on the importance of play for creative development in children and adults. Playing not only gets the creative juices flowing, it also helps us form close relationships and trust each other. And trust allows individuals to feel comfortable sharing their ideas; to stop “self-editing,” which is an adult trait. Trust allows us to have that big idea and go for it. “We think playfulness helps us get to better creative solutions, helps us do our jobs better, and helps us feel better when we do them,” said Brown. •

What You Can Do Today To Enhance Your Creativity Relax

Take a walk, play a game. Let your mind be free of its normal obligations.

Stop self-editing

Don’t be afraid to have an idea; don’t think that every idea is “stupid.” Give yourself the freedom to think freely. Critical thinking can come later.

Don’t give up

While relaxation and free thinking can help you start to be more creative, creativity also requires daily practice, discipline, and time. Some of the most creative people come up with their best ideas only after hours, days, weeks, or years of creative thought and critical thinking about a problem or question. If the “a-ha” moment doesn’t strike you right away, take solace in the fact that it rarely does.

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The stages of creativity by Maria Popova

“The habit of mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas.”

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MARIA POPOVA • THE STAGES OF CREATIVITY

Literature is the original “internet,” woven of a web of allusions, references, and citations that link different works together into an endless rabbit hole of discovery. Case in point: Last week’s wonderful field guide to creativity, Dancing About Architecture, mentioned in passing an intriguing old book originally published by James Webb Young in 1939 — A Technique for Producing Ideas. Young — an ad man by trade but, as we’ll see, a voraciously curious and cross-disciplinary thinker at heart — lays out with striking lucidity and clarity the five essential steps for a productive creative process, touching on a number of elements corroborated by modern science and thinking on creativity: its reliance on process over mystical talent, its combinatorial nature, its demand for a pondering period, its dependence on the brain’s unconscious processes, and more. Right from the introduction, original Mad Man and DDB founder Bill Bernbach captures the essence of Young’s ideas, with which Steve Jobs would have no doubt agreed when he proclaimed that “creativity is just connecting things”: Mr. Young is in the tradition of some of our greatest thinkers when he describes the workings of the creative process. It is a tribute to him that such scientific giants as Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein have written similarly on this subject.

They agree that knowledge is basic to good creative thinking but that it is not enough, that this knowledge must be digested and eventually emerge in the form of fresh, new combinations and relationships. Einstein refers to this as intuition, which he considers the only path to new insights. To be sure, however, Young marries the intuitive with the practical in his formulation: The production of ideas is just as definite a process as the production of Fords; that the production of ideas, too, runs on an assembly line; that in this production the mind follows an operative technique which can be learned and controlled; and that its effective use is just as much a matter of practice in the technique as is the effective use of any tool. In a chapter on training the mind: In learning any art the important things to learn are, first, Principles, and second, Method. This is true of the art of producing ideas. Particular bits of knowledge are nothing, because they are made up of so called rapidly aging facts. Principles and method are everything. So with the art of producing ideas. What is most valuable to know is not where to look for a particular idea, but how to train the mind in the method by which all ideas are produced and how to grasp the principles which are at the source of all ideas.

But the most compelling part of Young’s treatise, in a true embodiment of combinatorial creativity, builds upon the work of legendary Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (of Pareto principle fame) and his The Mind and Society. Young proposes two key principles for creating — that an idea is a new combination and that the ability to generate new combinations depends on the ability to see relationships between different elements. The first principle is that an idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements. The second important principle involved is that the capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships. Here, I suspect, is where minds differ to the greatest degree when it comes to the production of ideas. To some minds each fact is a separate bit of knowledge. To others it is a link in a chain of knowledge. It has relationships and similarities. It is not so much a fact as it is an illustration of a general law applying to a whole series of facts. Consequently the habit of mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas.

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THE STAGES OF CREATIVITY • MARIA POPOVA

PREPARATION, GATHERING RAW MATERIAL Young talks about the importance of building a rich pool of “raw material” — mental resources from which to build new combinations — and also articulates the increasing importance of quality information filters in our modern information diet. This notion of gathering raw material is the first step in his outline of the creative process: Gathering raw material in a real way is not as simple as it sounds. It is such a terrible chore that we are constantly trying to dodge it. The time that ought to be spent in material gathering is spent in wool gathering. Instead of working systematically at the job of gathering raw material we sit around hoping for inspiration to strike us. When we do that we are trying to get the mind to take the fourth step in the idea-producing process while we dodge the preceding steps. Young knew that the future belongs to the curious. His insistence on the importance of curiosity would make Richard Feynman nod in agreement: Every really good creative person… whom I have ever known has always had two noticeable characteristics. ISSUE 11/ SPRING 2015

First, there was no subject under the sun in which he could not easily get interested. Every facet of life had fascination for him. Second, he was an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information. For it is with the advertising man as with the cow: no browsing, no milk. The process is something like that which takes place in the kaleidoscope. The kaleidoscope, as you know, is an instrument which designers sometimes use in searching for new patterns. It has little pieces of colored glass in it, and when these are viewed through a prism they reveal all sorts of geometrical designs. Every turn of its crank shifts these bits of glass into a new relationship and reveals a new pattern. The mathematical possibilities of such new combinations in the kaleidoscope are enormous, and the greater the number of pieces of glass in it the greater become the possibilities for new and striking combinations.

bits of material which you have gathered and feel them all over, as it were, with the tentacles of the mind. You take one fact, turn it this way and that, look at it in different lights, and feel for the meaning of it. You bring two facts together and see how they fit. What you are seeking now is the relationship, a synthesis where everything will come together in a neat combination, like a jig-saw puzzle.

INCUBATION

DIGESTING THE MATERIAL In his second stage of the creative process, digesting the material, Young affirms Paola Antonelli’s brilliant metaphor of the curious octopus: What you do is to take the different

In his third stage of the creative process, Young stresses the importance of making absolutely “no effort of a direct nature”: It is important to realize that this is just as definite and just as necessary a stage in the process as the two preceding ones. What you have to do at this time, apparently, is to turn the problem over to your unconscious mind and let it work while you sleep. When you reach this third stage in the production of an idea, drop the problem completely and turn to whatever stimulates your imagination and emotions. Listen to music, go to the theater or movies, read poetry ora detective story. This is period of unconscious

MARIA POPOVA • THE STAGES OF CREATIVITY

processing, during which no direct effort is exerted upon the problem at hand — this is where the “combinatory play” that marked Einstein’s thought takes place. It has two divergent elements — the “negative fact” that during Incubation we don’t consciously deliberate on a particular problem, and the “positive fact” of a series of unconscious, involuntary mental events taking place. “Voluntary abstention from conscious thought on any problem may, itself, take two forms: the period of abstention may be spent either in conscious mental work on other problems, or in a relaxation from all conscious mental work. The first kind of Incubation economizes time, and is therefore often the better.”

beloved graphic designer Paula Scher likens to the winning alignment of a slot machine, the same kind of “chance-opportunism” masquerading as serendipity that fuels much of scientific discovery. But, this illumination can’t be forced: If we so define the Illumination stage as to restrict it to this instantaneous “flash,” it is obvious that we cannot influence it by a direct effort of will; because we can only bring our will to bear upon psychological events which last for an appreciable time. On the other hand, the final “flash,” or “click” … is the culmination of a successful train of association, which may have lasted for an appreciable time, and which has probably been preceded by a series of tentative and unsuccessful trains. The series of unsuccessful trains of association may last for periods varying from a few seconds to several hours. Sometimes the successful train seems to consist of a single leap of association, or of successive leaps which are so rapid as to be almost instantaneous.

ILLUMINATION Following Incubation is the Illumination stage — that flash of insight that the conscious self can’t will and the subliminal self can only welcome once all elements gathered during the Preparation stage have floated freely around during Incubation and are now ready to click into an illuminating new formation. It is the moment ISSUE 11/ SPRING 2015

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Do not make the mistake of holding your idea close to your chest at this stage. Submit it to the criticism of the judicious. When you do, a surprising thing will happen. You will find that a good idea has, as it were, self-expanding qualities.â&#x20AC;? ISSUE 11/ SPRING 2015

MARIA POPOVA • THE STAGES OF CREATIVITY

IDEA MEETS REALITY Young calls the last stage “the cold, gray dawn of the morning after,” when your newborn idea has to face reality: It requires a deal of patient working over to make most ideas fit the exact conditions, or the practical exigencies, under which they must work. And here is where many good ideas are lost. The idea man, like the inventor, is often not patient enough or practical enough to go through with this adapting part of the process. But it has to be done if you are to put ideas to work in a work-a-day world. Do not make the mistake of holding your idea close to your chest at this stage. Submit it to the criticism of the judicious.When you do, a surprising thing will happen. You will find that a good idea has, as it were, self-expanding qualities. It stimulates those who see it to add to it. Thus possibilities in it which you have overlooked will come to light. The last stage, unlike the second and the third, shares with the first a conscious and deliberate effort in the way of testing the validity of the idea and reducing the idea itself to an exact form: It never happens that unconscious work supplies readymade the result of a lengthy calculation in which we only have to apply fixed rules. All that we can hope from these inspirations, which are the fruit of unconscious work, is to obtain points of departure for such calculations. As for the calculations themselves, they must be made in the second period of conscious work which follows the inspiration, and in which the results of the inspiration are verified and the consequences deduced.

They demand discipline, attention, will, and consequently, conscious work. But perhaps most important of all is the interplay of the stages and the fact that none of them exists in isolation from the rest, for the mechanism of creativity is a complex machine of innumerable, perpetually moving parts: In the daily stream of thought these four different stages constantly overlap each other as we explore different problems. An economist reading a Blue Book, a physiologist watching an experiment, or a business man going through his morning’s letters, may at the same time be “incubating” on a problem which he proposed to himself a few days ago, be accumulating knowledge in “preparation” for a second problem, and be “verifying” his conclusions on a third problem. Even in exploring the same problem, the mind may be unconsciously incubating on one aspect of it, while it is consciously employed in preparing for or verifying another aspect. And it must always be remembered that much very important thinking, done for instance by a poet exploring his own memories, or by a man trying to see clearly his emotional relation to his country or his party, resembles musical composition in that the stages leading to success are not very easily fitted into a “problem and solution” scheme. Yet, even when success in thought means the creation of something felt to be beautiful and true rather than the solution of a prescribed problem, the four stages of Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and the Verification of the final result can generally be distinguished from each other. •

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what is you talented an afraid of th by Bob Hambly

Bob Hamblyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s curious mind and knack for personal service set the tone at the awardwinning Toronto-based ad agency Hambly & Woolley. Educated at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Hambly frequently speaks on graphic design and design-related topics at universities and associations throughout North America.

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ung, nd he dark? Over the years, I’ve learned that when it comes to riddles, the world is split into two types of people — those who live for a good riddle and those who abhor them. One particular photography team our firm works with is living proof of this. At any given shoot, half of the team typically shuts down at the mention of a riddle, to the point where they will physically distance themselves from the discussion. As the art director at these shoots, I like to monitor the general mood of the creative team and keep things positive. So introducing riddles doesn’t always work. Some people find these conundrums intimidating and not very much fun at all. Conversely, riddle-lovers welcome the challenge to solve a new mystery. Just the mere mention of a riddle gets the adrenalin flowing. As J.J. Abrams, the accomplished television and movie producer, says, “Mystery demands that you stop and consider — or, at the very least, slow down and discover.”

Recently, our graphic design firm experienced a perplexing situation that exposed some weaknesses in our creative process. This surprised and worried me. The more I thought about this dilemma, the more I wanted to understand what had happened. We had our very own mystery, and I wanted to solve it. In December 2013, a printer selected us to produce an issue of its monthly magazine, Wayward Arts — working with the theme of “community.” The assignment was extremely open, allowing us to dive into a subject matter of our own choice. After several discussions, we settled on an altogether alluring community: bees. The mention of beehives, beekeepers, honey hunters, hexagons, pollination, migration, heraldry and colony collapse, none of which we knew much about, genuinely excited us. The project proved to be a welcome diversion from our other work and kept us immersed in “all things bees” for the next four months.

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WHAT IS YOUNG, TALENTED AND AFRAID OF THE DARK? • BOB HAMBLY

The result was Bees, a 34-page publication showcasing various printing techniques, from laser cutting and silk-screening to metallic and fluorescent inks. We were sitting on so much research that we also produced a one-page website called the Beeswax for those viewers interested in learning more about these busy creatures.

top: mind-maping for the project “Bees” middle and bottom: “Bees” publication spreads

So where’s the dilemma? What’s the mystery? The seasoned designers in our studio fully recognized that an opportunity with this amount of creative freedom doesn’t come around very often. Their enthusiasm was palpable. Yet throughout the design process, they observed that the junior designers seemed far less invested in the project. They were shying away from discussions, were hesitant to contribute ideas and lacked an overall curiosity for the subject matter. Coincidentally, another design firm creating a Wayward Arts issue experienced the exact same problem — lackadaisical junior designers. And like me, they found this troubling. I spent many hours pondering this mystery. Like a tape loop, the Bees design process played over and over in my mind. Where did things go wrong? We had been very open-minded in our design process — encouraging participation, discussion and ideas. We made ample time and resources available to all. It was when I reviewed notes from talks on curiosity I’ve given at design schools and conferences that I remembered research that provides an important clue. Studies have shown that a well-developed sense of curiosity nurtures other valuable qualities in young people, such as openmindedness, persistence and innovation. There, at the bottom of my notes, I’d written a phrase that was key: “tolerance for ambiguity.” Having a tolerance for ambiguity means being able to feel comfortable even when things are unresolved. You may not know where you are heading, but you realize that uncertainty is part of the process. Paul Sloane, author of the book How to Be a Brilliant Thinker, has the following to say about the subject: “Routine thinkers are often dogmatic. They see a clear route forward and they want to follow it.… they will likely follow the most obvious idea and not consider creative, complex or controversial choices.”

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Tolerance for ambiguity is not a trait we are born with, it is some-thing we learn over time, through experience in ultimately solving problems successfully. The senior designers in our studio had years of practicing this skill and use it intuitively on a daily basis. We assumed all designers worked the same way. What we didn’t take into account is that this skill is underdeveloped, possibly nonexistent, in most junior designers. Now that the mystery was solved, what next? How do you go about teaching someone to tolerate ambiguity and even relish the “not knowing” state before the riddle is solved? Can it even be taught? I believe so. It starts with how managers can help. Designers need time to absorb things, to explore a range of possibilities and to cultivate their ideas. Start by providing a thorough design brief so they have the necessary details to fully grasp the assignment. I’m not a big fan of group brainstorming sessions where others can influence and inhibit one’s thought process. They’ll be ready to discuss their ideas once they’ve had adequate time to do their own conceptualizing.

BOB HAMBLY • WHAT IS YOUNG, TALENTED AND AFRAID OF THE DARK?

It’s imperative that you make creatives comfortable with the idea of sharing their findings. Establish in-studio project boards, Pinterest boards, white walls and the like so that others can see what you’ve discovered. Collections of images and ideas can initiate provocative discussions and uncover fresh avenues to explore. Be mindful of what others add to the mix and stay receptive to their contributions and comments. Explaining and defending your ideas will help verify your commitment to them. Help designers get used to the fact that feeling unsettled is good. During the exploratory phase, they should remain impartial to all that they discover. Keep group meetings open and positive — no room for naysayers. Remind everyone to take time to digest and contemplate ideas that at first seem outside their comfort zone. Like archeologists, keep digging for more. You can start to make sense of the findings once it’s all unearthed. Don’t be intimidated by the confusion; with time and consideration, the pieces will start to fall into place.

Mind mapping for the project “Bees” ISSUE 11/ISSUE SPRING 11/2015 2015

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BOB HAMBLY • WHAT IS YOUNG, TALENTED AND AFRAID OF THE DARK?

Ideas are meant to change and evolve — nothing is written in stone. As visual people, designers can help themselves become more comfortable with the exploratory phase by creating pictures of their thought process and ideas. Mind mapping enables you to document your investigations and expose unforeseen connections. There are a variety of ways to mind-map — using words only, incorporating images and sketches, purchasing a mind-mapping software program. Take the time to create a style you are comfortable with. Your ideas need to reside somewhere other than inside your head. Let them out. Most important, stay flexible. Ideas are meant to change and evolve — nothing is written in stone. Consider fresh viewpoints, multiple viewpoints and opposing viewpoints. See where they lead you. The creative process is about curiosity and discovery. Remaining flexible is ultimately a sign of confidence —confidence to know when your ideas are strong and to admit when they are weak.

Developing a tolerance for ambiguity is, at its core, a personal undertaking. However, there are external factors that impact its growth. It helps to be in the company of designers, art directors and creative directors who value its importance. And working in an open-minded environment, where your ideas are encouraged and respected, makes a big impact. Improving this skill takes time, but it’s an investment worth making, for all involved. Canadian book publisher Robert Fitzhenry may have put it best when he said, “Uncertainty and mystery are energies of life. Don’t let them scare you unduly, for they keep boredom at bay and spark creativity.” You can wait for a person to tell you the answer to a riddle, but wouldn’t you rather experience the satisfaction of deciphering it on your own? •

“Bees” publication spreads ISSUE 11/ SPRING 2015

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Where ideias come from? by Maria Popova

Since long before the question of where good ideas come from became the psychologists’ favorite sport, readers, fans, and audiences have been hurling it at authors and artists, much to their frustration. A few brave souls like Neil Gaiman, Albert Einstein, and David Lynch have attempted to answer it directly, or in Leonard Cohen’s case to delightfully non-answer it directly, but none have done so with greater vigor of mind and heart than Ursula K. Le Guin — a writer of extraordinary wisdom delivered with irresistible wit, and the eloquent recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 2014 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In 1987, Le Guin addressed the eternal question in an essay titled “Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?,” found in the altogether fantastic 1989 collection of her speeches, essays, and reviews, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. Noting that audiences frequently ask her the canonical question after lectures and talks, she considers the two reasons that make it impossible to answer: The reason why it is unanswerable is, I think, that it involves at least two false notions, myths, about how fiction is written.

First myth: There is a secret to being a writer. If you can just learn the secret, you will instantly be a writer; and the secret might be where the ideas come from. Second myth: Stories start from ideas; the origin of a story is an idea. Well before psychologists’ pioneering findings to that effect, Le Guin writes: I will dispose of the first myth as quickly as possible. The “secret” is skill. If you haven’t learned how to do something, the people who have may seem to be magicians, possessors of mysterious secrets. In a fairly simple art, such as making pie crust, there are certain teachable “secrets” of method that lead almost infallibly to good results; but in any complex art, such as housekeeping, piano-playing, clothes-making, or story-writing, there are so many techniques, skills, choices of method, so many variables, so many “secrets,” some teachable and some not, that you can learn them only by methodical, repeated, longcontinued practice — in other words, by work. Some of the secretiveness of many artists about their techniques, recipes, etc., may be taken as a warning to the unskilled: What works for me isn’t going to work for you unless you’ve worked for it. ISSUE 11/ SPRING 2015

WHERE IDEIAS COME FROM? • MARIA POPOVA

Seconding Jack Kerouac’s question of whether writers are born or made, Le Guin considers the role of what we call natural talent and what it lies beneath it: My talent and inclination for writing stories and keeping house were strong from the start, and my gift for and interest in music and sewing were weak; so that I doubt that I would ever have been a good seamstress or pianist, no matter how hard I worked. But nothing I know about how I learned to do the things I am good at doing leads me to believe that there are “secrets” to the piano or the sewing machine or any art I’m no good at. There is just the obstinate, continuous cultivation of a disposition, leading to skill in performance. She then turns to the second central fallacy of the origin-of-ideas question, namely the notion of the “idea” itself: The more I think about the word “idea,” the less idea I have what it means. … I think this is a kind of shorthand use of “idea” to stand ISSUE 11/ SPRING 2015

for the complicated, obscure, ununderstood process of the conception and formation of what is going to be a story when it gets written down. The process may not involve ideas in the sense of intelligible thoughts; it may well not even involve words. It may be a matter of mood, resonances, mental glimpses, voices, emotions, visions, dreams, anything. It is different in every writer, and in many of us it is different every time. It is extremely difficult to talk about, because we have very little terminology for such processes. Echoing Einstein’s idea of “combinatory play” and artist Francis Bacon’s notion that original art is the product of finely “grinding up” one’s influences, Le Guin speaks to the combinatorial nature of the creative process: I would say that as a general rule, though an external event may trigger it, this inceptive state or storybeginning phase does not come from anywhere outside the mind that can be pointed to; it arises in the mind, from psychic contents that have

MARIA POPOVA • WHERE IDEIAS COME FROM?

become unavailable to the conscious mind, inner or outer experience that has been, in Gary Snyder’s lovely phrase, composted. I don’t believe that a writer “gets” (takes into the head) an “idea” (some sort of mental object) “from” somewhere, and then turns it into words and writes them on paper. At least in my experience, it doesn’t work that way. The stuff has to be transformed into oneself, it has to be composted, before it can grow a story. Mystical as the process may be, Le Guin goes on to outline its “five principal elements,” which must “work in one insoluble unitary movement” in order to produce great writing: 1 The patterns of the language — the sounds of words. 2 The patterns of syntax and grammar — the way the words and sentences connect themselves together; the ways their connections interconnect to form the larger units (paragraphs, sections, chapters); hence the movement of the work, its tempo, pace, gait, and shape in time.

3 The patterns of the images — what the words make us or let us see with the mind’s eye or sense imaginatively. 4 The patterns of the ideas — what the words and the narration of events make us understand, or use our understanding upon. 5 The patterns of the feelings — what the words and the narration, by using all the above means, make us experience emotionally or spiritually, in areas of our being not directly accessible to or expressible in words. All these kinds of patterning — sound, syntax, images, ideas, feelings — have to work together, and have to be there in some degree. The inception of the work, that mysterious stage, is perhaps their coming together: when in the author’s mind a feeling begins to connect itself to an image that will express it, and that image leads to an idea, until now half-formed, that begins to find words for itself, and the words lead to other words that make new images, perhaps of people, characters of a story, who are doing things that express the underlying feelings and ideasthat are now resonating with each other.

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WHERE IDEIAS COME FROM? • MARIA POPOVA

“To believe that you can achieve meaning or feeling without coherent, integrated patterning of the sounds, the rhythms, the sentence structures, the images, is like believing you can go for a walk without bones.”

Considering the lopsiding of that fivepoint balance, Le Guin speaks to the importance of failure in growth: If any of these processes get scanted badly or left out, in the conception stage, in the writing stage, or in the revising stage, the result will be a weak or failed story. Failure often allows us to analyze what success triumphantly hides from us. In a sentiment that Rebecca Solnit would come to second decades later in reflecting on the shared intimacy of reading and writing, Le Guin deploys one of her characteristically animated metaphors that can’t help but put a smile on the soul: Beginners’ failures are often the result of trying to work with strong feelings and ideas without having found the images to embody them, or without even knowing how to find the words and string them together. Ignorance of English vocabulary and grammar is a considerable liability to a writer of English. The best cure for it is, I believe, reading. People who learned ISSUE 11/ SPRING 2015

to talk at two or so and have been practicing talking ever since feel with some justification that they know their language; but what they know is their spoken language, and if they read little, or read schlock, and haven’t written much, their writing is going to be pretty much what their talking was when they were two. There is a relationship, a reciprocity between the words and the images, ideas, and emotions evoked by those words: the stronger that relationship, the stronger the work. To believe that you can achieve meaning or feeling without coherent, integrated patterning of the sounds, the rhythms, the sentence structures, the images, is like believing you can go for a walk without bones. Imagery takes place in “the imagination,” which I take to be the meeting place of the thinking mind with the sensing body… In the imagination we can share a capacity for experience and an understanding of truth far greater than our own. The great writers share their souls with us — “literally.”

MARIA POPOVA • WHERE IDEIAS COME FROM?

The intellect cannot do the work of the imagination; the emotions cannot do the work of the imagination; and neither of them can do anything much in fiction without the imagination. Where the writer and the reader collaborate to make the work of fiction is perhaps, above all, in the imagination. In the joint creation of the fictive world. With a self-effacing wink at her profession and the odd creative rituals of her ilk, Le Guin considers the writer’s eternal tussle with his or her consciousness of, and often self-consciousness about, the audience — an audience that, today, is exponentially more able and willing to make its presence and opinion known

via likes, tweets, and other innocuously named, spiritually toxic Pavlovian mechanisms: Writers are egotists. All artists are. They can’t be altruists and get their work done. And writers love to whine about the Solitude of the Author’s Life, and lock themselves into corklined rooms or droop around in bars in order to whine better. But although most writing is done in solitude, I believe that it is done, like all the arts, for an audience. That is to say, with an audience. All the arts are performance arts, only some of them are sneakier about it than others.

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WHERE IDEIAS COME FROM • MARIA POPOVA

A story rises from the springs of creation, from the pure will to be; it tells itself; it takes its own course, finds its own way, its own words.

But her most piercing point — one she would come to echo three decades later in her National Book Award acceptance speech — is a monumental disclaimer: I beg you please to attend carefully now to what I am not saying. I am not saying that you should think about your audience when you write. I am not saying that the writing writer should have in mind, “Who will read this? Who will buy it? Who am I aiming this at?” — as if it were a gun. No. While planning a work, the writer may and often must think about readers: particularly if it’s something like a story for children, where you need to know whether your reader is likely to be a five-year-old or a ten-year old. Considerations of who will or might read the piece are appropriate and sometimes actively useful in planning it, thinking about it, thinking it out, inviting images. But once you start writing, it is fatal to think about anything but the writing. True work is done for the sake of doing it. What is to be done with it afterwards is another matter, another job. A story rises from the springs of creation, from the pure will to be; it tells itself; it takes its own course, finds its own way, its own words; and the writer’s job is to be its medium.

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But the writer cannot do it alone. The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it alive: a live thing, a story. It comes down to collaboration, or sharing the gift: the writer tries to get the reader working with the text in the effort to keep the whole story all going along in one piece in the right direction (which is my general notion of a good piece of fiction). In this effort, writers need all the help they can get. Even under the most skilled control, the words will never fully embody the vision. Even with the most sympathetic reader, the truth will falter and grow partial. Writers have to get used to launching something beautiful and watching it crash and burn. They also have to learn when to let go control, when the work takes off on its own and flies, farther than they ever planned or imagined, to places they didn’t know they knew. All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them. •

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Art-based Learning Unlocking creative potential is key to economic growth by Linda Naiman

We need more humanity and fewer algorithms.

Arts-based learning is the instrumental use of artistic skills, processes and experiences as educational tools to foster learning in non-artistic disciplines and domains. Artists and business leaders have many parallels. Both involve having a guiding vision, a potent point of view, formulating an ideal, navigating chaos and the unknown, and finally producing a new creation. Unlocking creative potential is key to economic growth. Creativity is not the mystical attribute reserved for the lucky few. Creativity is a process that can be developed and managed. Generating innovative ideas is both a function of the mind, and a function of behaviours, behaviours anyone can put into practice. Creativity begins with a foundation of knowledge, learning a discipline, and mastering whole brain thinking. We learn to be creative by experimenting, exploring, questioning assumptions, using imagination and synthesizing information.

Arts Based Learning Activities Arts based activities include drawing, painting, storytelling, theatre improvisation, photography and poetry. Art-based activities can be used strategically to create safety, build trust, find shared values, shift perceptions. Mine group gold, extract meaningful creativity, and generate breakthrough ideas — by combining right-brain imagination with left-brain logic and analysis. We cannot find all the answers to our challenges in the world of the rational, logical, and scientific. Consequently the arts are emerging as a role model for business to adopt. Through art we can make it safe ask the deeper questions that lead to the emotional truth about a situation. Art creates a bonding experience that facilitates collaboration and accelerates the ability get to the heart of a problem. Drawing or painting images illustrates how differently we see things, and helps us appreciate that many points of view contribute to the whole. Images externalize the unconscious and make tacit knowledge visible. Art-based activities can be used strategically to create safety, build

trust, find shared values, and shift perceptions. Combining right-brain imagination with left-brain logic and analysis increases the capacity for breakthrough ideias and insights that lead to sucess. What can we learn from the arts that we can apply to business? “Artists and business leaders have many parallels. Both involve having a guiding vision, a potent point of view, formulating an ideal, navigating chaos and the unknown, and finally producing a new creation. They must be astute in assessing and developing talent, as well as making sure that the talent works well together. Executives, however, could learn from artists’ ability to dare to break molds, lead changes in taste, raise funds, and be productive while being frugal.” Wall Street Journal (2003)

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ART-BASED LEARNING • LINDA NAIMAN

Mine group gold, extract meaningful creativity, and generate breakthrough ideas — by combining right-brain imagination with left-brain logic and analysis.

If the biggest challenges we face today concern global competition, managing change, and employee disengagement (to name a few), what can leaders do to inspire teams to achieve higher levels of performance? How can leaders tap into the hearts and minds of employees, to find the “burning platform” that mobilizes strategy into action? Innovation by its nature, demands change. In The Heart of Change, John Kotter states: “People change what they do less because they are given analysis that shifts their thinking than because they are shown a truth that influences their feelings.” He emphasizes that the central challenge is changing people’s behavior and the way to change behavior is to influence their feelings. “The heart of change is in the emotions.”

So, To uso or not to use the arts in business? Basically there are four options regarding Arts-in-Business:

1 Business uses the arts for decoration. 2 Business uses the arts for entertainment, either by

giving the employees benefits such as tickets for selected shows, performances and arts exhibitions in their leisure time, or they invite artists into the company for performances at annual meetings, customer events or special occasions.

3 Business applies the arts as instrumentsfor left image: Lego Masters: Vincent Ad Agency: Geometry Global, Hong Kong right image: Campaign from 2006, via the USA. How do you say “Imagination” without saying it? This is how. Ad agency: Blattner Brunner. ISSUE 11/ SPRING 2015

teambuilding, communication training, leadership development, problem solving and innovation processes.

4 Business integrates the arts in a strategic process

of transformation, involving personal development and leadership, culture and identity, creativity and innovation, as well as customer relations and marketing. Lotte Darsø, Artful Creation (2004)

LINDA NAIMAN • ART-BASED LEARNING

Organizations using the arts in training and development Terry McGraw, chairman and CEO of The McGraw HillCompanies, characterizes creativity as a “business imperative,” and puts his companies’ successful experiences with arts-based learning in a broad strategic context of “surfacing creativity” through engagement with the arts. “Creativity is essential because it is at the heart of innovation, and innovation is a growth driver and, therefore, a business imperative. That is why, for several years, The McGraw-Hill Companies has been using artsbased learning as a training tool in several key leadership initiatives — The arts have served as a complementary vehicle to more traditional learning approaches. They have helped to change attitudes by letting employees confront their assumptions in a nontraditional and non-intimidating environment. The results of using arts-based learning and training have been very positive for The McGraw-Hill Companies Arts-based training is part of an overall strategy and commitment of the corporation to help ‘surface’ creativity.”

Art based Learning Outcomes & Benefits

1 Art is a potent catalyst for a deeper inquiry into business issues, providing the means for ‘artful reflection’ in organizational development.

2 Create a shared vision.

Find shared values quickly and without aggravating debate.

3 Prototype possibilities to develop new products/ services. 4 Rehearse “what if” options that lead to meaningful insights regarding change.

5 Creativity and innovation skills development 6 Aesthetic experience helps leaders make tacit knowledge visible (patterns, processes and relationships).

7 Art-making processes help nurture relationships between dissimilar groups, fostering an appreciation for diverse and pluralistic points of view.

8 Art is the antidote to information overload AND to the pressure of always being in control.

9 Employee engagement.

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ART-BASED LEARNING • LINDA NAIMAN

Being a leader in the 21st century requires creativity, artistry, empathy and the ability to cope with complexity. Executive leaders know they cannot rely solely on logic, analysis and problem-solving skills. These are crucial but insufficient if the goal is to innovate and compete on value rather than price. Executives charged with producing continuous high-value innovation must also develop the emotional and cultural intelligence to bridge cultural divides and achieve optimal sustainable results — without exploiting people or the planet. As organizations worldwide experience the value of artsbased learning, the arts are being incorporated into training curricula and integrated within organizational cultures.

top: “Life’s too short for the wrong job” 2006, Berlin Company: Jobsintown.de Ad Agency: Scholz & Friends bottom: “Frontline: Get them of your dog.” 2009, Indonesia Ad agency: Saatchi & Saatchi

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LINDA NAIMAN • ART-BASED LEARNING

Ditching PowerPoint The more I integrate the arts in leadership training the less I use PowerPoint. When introduced a seminar by saying we were now in a PowerPoint-free zone, the entire audience clapped! It’s clear people have PowerPoint fatigue. Experimenting I had an opportunity to experiment with arts-based learning and technology at a corporate global learning center in New York. It was the first time I’ve been asked by a client to experiment with her and it was so refreshing not to worry about a perfect outcome. We could take a playful and experimental approach to learning — which is what learning should be, when we are charting a new course.

Inspiring Excellence Within cultures of excellence leaders create the conditions for people to do their best work. The best leaders are good listeners. Not only do they call upon the expertise of their employees (that’s why they got hired, right?) they also acknowledge input and consider employee suggestions. When the group is invited to help find a solution or participate in co-creating the future, you create dynamic and engaged workforce. The arts play vital roles in helping us find our authentic voice, and remembering who we are as human beings. People trust and respect leaders who show their humanity and I believe when we are in touch with our humanity, we envision better futures, and make wiser decisions. I also believe that the purpose of any business innovation, beyond making a profit, is to improve quality of life. •

left image: Lego Masters: Vincent Ad Agency: Geometry Global, Hong Kong right image: Campaign from 2006, via the USA. How do you say “Imagination” without saying it? This is how. Ad agency: Blattner Brunner.

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Arts-based teaching and learning activities The classroom level by Robin Rooney for the VSA Arts Washington, DC

“teachers who implement artsbased instructional strategies achieve are more enthusiastic, do their jobs better, and develop a ‘higher order’ of thinking.”

Right image: Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, 2014

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Classroom models bring art activities to students in a regular classroom setting. An “artist-in-the classroom” or “artist-in-residence” works cooperatively with the students’ regular teacher to plan and implement art or arts-based lessons. At the community level, arts-based teaching and learning improves relationships and, therefore, cooperation among partners. The literature reported positive effects associated with community involvement. Community arts partnerships, for example, were said to build relationships among organizations. Such relationships resulted in better cooperation and more creative problem solving. Whole-school reform models that involve the community create partnerships with other organizations, as well as with parents. Partnerships increased access to resources from other organizations. Parent participation increased as parents became more involved in their child’s education through arts-based school activities. Involvement in artsbased teaching and learning activities made parents more aware of the curriculum guiding the education of their children. Arts-based teaching and learning improves classroom and school climate.

Increased attendance, student participation, communication, and flexibility associated with arts-based teaching and learning practices improve classroom climate, according to the literature. Students who participated in an artist-in-theclassroom project, for example, showed improvement in test scores, in part due to better attendance. The success of such activities, researchers noted, can vary according to the regular classroom teacher’s level of interest and participation. Authors reported that implementation of a whole-school arts-based curriculum increases student levels of participation. Authors linked student interest in learning with increased communication, and attention to creativity and self-esteem. Arts-based instructional practices improve teacher quality. The literature asserts that teachers who implement arts-based instructional strategies achieve are more enthusiastic, do their jobs better, and develop a “higher order” of thinking. Academic teachers who learn arts-based instruction become more artistic and creative. A collaborative, interdisciplinary teaching experience provides deeper learning experiences for both teachers and students. Teachers who became involved in whole-school reform also

ROBIN ROONEY • ARTS-BASED TEACHING AND LEARNING ACTIVITIES

became more enthusiastic about teaching. Teachers in high arts schools are more innovative, more flexible, and more likely to participate in professional development activities. Arts-based teaching increases a teacher’s repertoire of engaging instructional strategies. Participating in the instruction of a blended curriculum, for example, helps teachers become more child- focused, more aware of student capacity, and better able to assess child progress. Arts-based instruction increases interest and motivation. All students, including diverse learners and those at risk for academic failure, can reportedly achieve more and are more likely to stay in school when they have a “love for learning”. Students who struggle with school because they are not part of the dominant culture benefit from arts in education because the arts make education more equitable.

Arts-based instruction increases self-esteem and willingness to try new things. As students become more engaged in learning, their attitudes toward school, and toward themselves, improve. Students with a positive attitude toward learning are more willing to try new things. As Eisner put it (2002), the arts allow people to “invent and reinvent themselves”. As attitudes improve along with a willingness to experiment, arts-based learning activities give students skills with which they can “explore uncertainty”. Arts-based instruction develops thinking skills. Thinking skills attributed to artsbased teaching include improved comprehension, interpretation, and problem solving. The crossdisciplinary learning environment associated with arts-based instruction,

in particular, helps students develop deeper, broader, or “higher-order” thinking skills. Such skills enable the learner to recognize, contrast, and compare varying elements of the world around him and, therefore, to comprehend its complexity. Efland (2002) relates higher levels of thinking to the comprehension of symbols: the ability to interpret symbols and construct their meaning. The arts, in its various media and approaches, offer a broad range of symbols and other ways of representing ideas. Students who experience the arts learn to interpret symbols and understand abstract ideas. Students of the visual arts, for example, learn visual problem solving by interpreting the symbolism of visual artworks. The ability to construct meaning through various representations leads to deeper, more conceptual thinking.

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ARTS-BASED TEACHING AND LEARNING ACTIVITIES • ROBIN ROONEY

“ (...) the arts allow people to invent and reinvent themselves. As attitudes improve along with a willingness to experiment, arts-based learning activities give students skills with which they can explore uncertainty. ”

Arts-based instruction develops neural systems. Its influence on neural systems is another way to associate arts with learning. By engaging the brain, the arts enhance neurobiological systems that support cognitive, emotional, attention, and immune systems. Music, for example, has been found to synchronize neural firing patterns. Instruction in music promotes and maintains this synchronicity, which increases the efficiency and effectiveness of the brain. Authors attribute such brain activity with increased ability in the areas of spatial reasoning, creativity, and general math. A study of Learning In and Through the Arts (LITA), as noted in Champions of Change supports this notion that arts learning has a positive, albeit indirect, effect on general learning. Authors suggest that learning across subjects and domains goes back and forth, stimulating one another, and creating a “constellation” of influence.

Right image: Skatalites and Skavolutionary Orchestra at the World Beat Center in San Diego, CA, 2013

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This complex web of stimulation and influence creates an enhanced learning environment in which the arts contribute critical opportunities for engaged, active, cross-disciplinary teaching and learning. An enhanced learning environment such as this is key to academic achievement. In a similar assertion, Burton discussed the capacity of arts instruction for developing skills and abilities that support student achievement. The arts teach students to solve problems, elaborate ideas, and to structure and organize different kinds of experiences. Such skills are transferable to science, math, and language, although this transfer cannot be characterized as “one-way.” Similar to the conceptualization of a web or constellation of influence across learning domains, Burton described the dynamic, reciprocal relationship in which learning activities, such as visual art, music, literature, reading, and social studies, are combined so that one subject challenges another.

Academic development may be related to arts-based learning. Competencies and dispositions developed through arts-based teaching also emerged in other subject areas, such as science, math, and language. Here’s the evidence that supports positive relationships between arts and academics:

Drama develops higher-order language and literacy skills; Music enhances language learning and spatial reasoning; Art experiences develop writing, literacy and numeracy skills.

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Let’s take a moment to define culture. Anthropologists look at culture as a system of behaviors, values and shared beliefs. These learned behaviors provide, in the words of anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, author of Mirror for Man, “a set of techniques for adjusting to the external environment.” Ethnographers define culture as the common habits, customs and traditions that connect people together.

UNDERSTAND WHY CULTURE MATTERS

When it comes to producing great work within agencies, design firms and production houses, culture comes first. Work is an artifact of culture. An outcome. In the same way that weather makes snowflakes, culture makes work. It’s not the other way around.

So how do companies create culture? More important, how do companies transmit culture? Turns out that culture is viral. It is transmitted the same way influenza spreads: by infection. Culture is passed from one person who understands the core values of the company to another. Done right, viral transmission means employee number 37 knows what the core values are. And so do employees 370 and 3700. “Get the culture right, (and) most of the other stuff — like delivering great customer service or building an enduring brand and business — will happen naturally.” That’s not the philosophy of a starry-eyed kid working in a San Francisco startup. It’s the true north of Tony Hsieh, the guy who sold Zappos to Amazon for $1.2 billion.

Where Creatives Work, Culture is King Pinterest, Facebook and Airbnb show us how it’s done. by Sam McMillan PUT THE CULT IN CULTURE

RECOGNIZE THAT CULTURE STARTS WITH YOU

And who will do this? You. If you don’t take responsibility for creating your own culture at work, you’re going to leave culture up to the well-meaning folks in human resources. Before you know it, you’ll be doing trust exercises, falling backward, eyes shut, into the dubious embrace of the vice president of sales. Do nothing and culture will curdle. The best people leave, taking their ambitions, portfolios and bad memories with them. The complacent stay. Here are some guidelines that can ensure you do the best work of your life at a place you’ll be glad to come to every day.

Stake a claim on a public office wall. Create a hall of fame for the best work your agency is doing. If you and your colleagues are not doing great work, then pin up examples of worthy work done by other firms. Set the bar high; choose great examples. Tell your team, “This is what we should be doing” and explain why.

The transmission of culture is an exercise in collaborative mythmaking. In other words, companies must create a cult so cool that everyone wants to join it.

To transmit culture virally within your agency, you’ll have to become patient zero. But in a good way. Start with your own work. Pin it up on your cubicle or office wall. Cover the space. Be loud and proud. You’ll be able to use it to spark a conversation about what’s working and what’s not. Then encourage others to do the same.

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WHERE CREATIVES WORK CULTURE IS KING • SAM MCMILLAN

Facebook Analog Research Lab during a class with Jessica Helfand and Alternatives in Action. (2015)

in a PowerPoint presentation, Airbnb-ers get a whimsical journey presented in framed storyboards. Displayed prominently in the Airbnb headquarters, the storyboards ensure that every employee is on the same page.

TELL YOUR STORY: TAKE OVER THE STATION

What’s one of the first things that happens during a coup? Revolutionaries take over the TV station. By controlling the means of communication as well as the content, designers can control the debate. And that’s a huge step toward influencing your company’s culture. One of the goals of the internal Airbnb design team, Schapiro says, is to “tell the story of the brand to the employees.” At Airbnb that means telling the story of its hosts. Along one of the entryways to its corporate offices, where keyless doorways are emblazoned with “Champion the Mission,” a gallery of work by photographer Todd Selby documents the host experience in dozens of photos and drawings. Selby showed up as a guest in five Airbnb locations around the world, then did a deep dive into host culture. Selby followed his hosts to work, met their friends, drank in local bars — and shot it all. Other walls in the Airbnb office boast monumental four by sixfoot portraits of hosts along with captions that tell their personal story. “It’s about the experience of belonging,” Schapiro says. Quoting Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Schapiro rattles off the needs for shelter, community and self-worth. Ultimately, he says, “the Airbnb culture comes down to making a human connection.”

“Every time you make a bad ad, a unicorn dies.” If that doesn’t work, try the wall of shame. Pin up the worst examples of ads. The principle here is that manure makes great fertilizer. One in-house design agency used to post boneheaded ads under the banner: “Every time you make a bad ad, a unicorn dies.” Do this until someone tells you to stop.

START WITH YOUR COMPANY’S VALUES

Champion the mission. Be a host. Every frame matters. These are just three of the six company values at Airbnb, according to its art director Andrew Schapiro. “Every frame matters” is another way of saying sweat the details. Drawn from moviemaking, “every frame matters” is taken literally at Airbnb. When CEO Brian Chesky learned that Snow White was the first film to be storyboarded frame-by-frame, he went out and hired a former Pixar storyboard artist. The result is a journey through the Airbnb host and guest customer experience, one touch point at a time. Instead of a flow chart buried ISSUE 11/ SPRING 2015

LIVE YOUR VALUES, THEN DISPLAY THEM

As Pinterest brand manager, Everett Katigbak ensures that the core values and the narrative of the Pinterest brand are understood, adopted and spread by employees to its end users. The number one brand value, Katigbak says, is “Put pinners first.” One result is a two-story-tall mosaic that employees created at the center of the cafeteria. Composed of tiny headshots of individual Pinterest users, the mosaic isn’t just a cool piece of corporate art. Turns out the mosaic functions like a fundraising thermometer, depicting Pinterest’s rising growth rate in user-centric terms. As the mosaic works its way higher up the cafeteria wall, it’s a powerful reminder that Pinterest’s growth depends on its core value.

SAM MCMILLAN • WHERE CREATIVES WORK CULTURE IS KING

CROSS-TRAIN FOR SKILLS

When your design team cross-trains for skills, you’ll not only share skills, you’ll build camaraderie and spread culture. Designers, writers, art directors and marketers are creative to their cores. That’s why they are called creatives. To transmit that creative culture companywide, start a weekly studio night session. Pinterest’s afterhours sessions have included bookbinding, fiction writing and code nights in which attendees learn to code an app in a night. Studio nights can be professional crosstraining sessions, where copywriters learn Photoshop and designers are taught to code. But culture can really grow when creatives share their passions and teach their hobbies. And everyone in the company should be invited to join.

SET UP A PLAYGROUND WITH A PURPOSE

The Facebook Analog Research Laboratory is an inhouse art and design studio boasting silkscreen stations, a dark room, wood type, a proof press, a sign-painting studio, a button maker and even two manual typewriters. It’s a playground with a purpose: to inspire creativity and amplify the Facebook culture. The lab provides the tools, the space to use them and classes that enable creative culture. Its silkscreened posters, created by lab staff and workshop participants, emblazon walls throughout the Facebook campus with the messages “Eventually everything connects,” “Nothing at Facebook is somebody else’s problem” and “Empathy. Have some.”

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WHERE CREATIVES WORK CULTURE IS KING • SAM MCMILLAN

Facebook Analog Research Lab silkscreen and sign painting. Facebook’s Little Red Book (2012)

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SAM MCMILLAN • WHERE CREATIVES WORK CULTURE IS KING

DEVELOP YOUR OWN ONBOARDING STRATEGY

Don’t rely on human resource’s one-day onboarding process to convey your internal culture. Take a tip from Facebook and set up your own Design Officers’ Training Corps. At Facebook, incoming designers, researchers and content strategists spend two weeks immersed in Design Corps—the design team’s specialized course that teaches new hires about the tools, teams and methodologies of working within the design team at Facebook. “Design Corps is an example of how the culture here has reacted to scale,” says Belonax. “The program was started by designers because the team was getting so big that we needed to make sure that everyone was up to speed on our latest processes and software.”

“What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” MAKE YOUR OWN EMPLOYEE HANDBOOK

Human resources has theirs. You should make yours. That’s what the team at the Facebook Analog Research Lab did. To commemorate one billion people using Facebook, the lab created The Book of HACK. The 100-page-plus “little red book” perfectly encapsulates the Facebook culture. Chockablock with statements like “Code wins arguments” and “Stay focused and keep shipping,” the book is a celebration of the hacker way.

CREATE OPPORTUNITIES FOR IMPACT

The Facebook Analog Research Lab doesn’t create Facebook culture. Through classes, lecture series and artists-in-residence series, the lab amplifies and transmits it.

Case in point: the “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” poster — in 2011, it inspired Facebook employees to write their own answers to the question directly on the poster. The concept went viral when it got a shout-out from Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, in her recent commencement speech to graduates of Barnard College. That slogan is now part of the culture at large, in the form of a movement designed to empower women, sponsored by Sandberg’s Lean In organization. So what would you do if you weren’t afraid? It’s time to live out your own poster. Your company culture depends on it. •

With its exposed Smythe binding, The Book of HACK exemplifies an attitude that “where nothing is finished, nothing is over,” says Tim Belonax, the lab’s principal designer. The book is such an effective transmission of Facebook culture that when CEO Mark Zuckerberg saw it, he asked that it be given to every new hire.

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Design Thinking by Tim Brown

Thomas Edison created the electric light-bulb and then wrapped an entire industry around it. The lightbulb is most often thought of as his signature invention, but Edison understood that the bulb was little more than a parlor trick without a system of electric power generation and transmission to make it truly useful, so he created that, too. Thus Edison’s genius lay in his ability to conceive of a fully developed marketplace, not simply a discrete device. He was able to envision how people would want to use what he made, and he engineered toward that insight. He wasn’t always prescient (he originally believed the phonograph would be used mainly as a business machine for recording and replaying dictation), but he invariably gave great consideration to users’ needs and preferences. Edison’s approach was an early example of what is now called “design thinking” — a methodology that imbues the full spectrum of innovation activities with a humancentered design ethos. By this I mean that innovation is powered by a thorough understanding, through direct observation, of what people want and need in their lives and what they like or dislike about the way particular products are made, packaged, marketed, sold, and supported.

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DESIGN THINKING • TIM BROWN

Many people believe that Edison’s greatest invention was the modern R&D laboratory and methods of experimental investigation. Edison wasn’t a narrowly specialized scientist but a broad generalist with a shrewd business sense. In his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory he surrounded himself with gifted tinkerers, improvisers, and experimenters. Indeed, he broke the mold of the “lone genius inventor” bycreating a team-based approach to innovation. Although Edison biographers write of the camaraderie enjoyed by this merry band, the process also featured endless rounds of trial and error — the “99% perspiration” in Edison’s famous definition of genius. His approach was intended not to validate preconceived hypotheses but to help experimenters learn something new from each iterative stab. Innovation is hard work; Edison made it a profession that blended art, craft, science, business savvy, and an astute understanding of customers and markets. Design thinking is a lineal descendant of that tradition. Put simply, it is a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity. Like Edison’s painstaking innovation process, it often entails a great deal of perspiration. I believe that design thinking has much to offer a business world in which most management ideas and best practices are freely available to be copied and exploited. Leaders now look to innovation as a principal source of differentiation and competitive advantage; they would do well to incorporate design thinking into all phases of the process.

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TIM BROWN • DESIGN THINKING

GETTING BENEATH THE SURFACE Historically, design has been treated as a downstream step in the development process — the point where designers, who have played no earlier role in the substantive work of innovation, come along and put a beautiful wrapper around the idea. To be sure, this approach has stimulated market growth in many areas by making new products and technologies aesthetically attractive and therefore more desirable to consumers or by enhancing brand perception through smart, evocative advertising and communication strategies. During the latter half of the twentieth century design became an increasingly valuable competitive asset in, for example, the consumer electronics, automotive, and consumer packaged goods industries. But in most others it remained a late stage add-on. Now, however, rather than asking designers to make an already developed idea more attractive to consumers, companies are asking them to create ideas that better meet consumers’ needs and desires. The former role is tactical, and results in limited value creation; the latter is strategic, and leads to dramatic new forms of value. Moreover, as economies in the developed world shift from industrial manufacturing to knowledge work and service delivery, innovation’s terrain is expanding. Its objectives are no

longer just physical products; they are new sorts of processes, services, ITpowered interactions, entertainments, and ways of communicating and collaborating — exactly the kinds of human centered activities in which design thinking can make a decisive difference (check A Design Thinker’s Personality Profile). Consider the large health care provider Kaiser Permanente, which sought to improve the overall quality of both patients’ and medical practitioners’ experiences. Businesses in the service sector can often make significant innovations on the front lines of service creation and delivery. By teaching design thinking techniques to nurses, doctors, and administrators, Kaiser hoped to inspire its practitioners to contribute new ideas. Over the course of several months Kaiser teams participated in workshops with the help of my firm, IDEO, and a group of Kaiser coaches. These workshops led to a portfolio of innovations, many of which are being rolled out across the company. One of them — a project to reengineer nursing-staff shift changes at four Kaiser hospitals — perfectly illustrates both the broader nature of innovation “products” and the value of a holistic design approach. The core project team included a strategist (formerly a nurse), an organizational development specialist, a technology ISSUE 11/ SPRING 2015

DESIGN THINKING • TIM BROWN

A Design Thinker’s Personality Profile Contrary to popular opinion, you don’t need weird shoes or a black turtleneck to be a design thinker. Nor are design thinkers necessarily created only by design schools, even though most professionals have had some kind of design training. My experience is that many people outside professional design have a natural aptitude for design thinking, which the right development and experiences can unlock. Here, as a starting point, are some of the characteristics to look for in design thinkers:

Empathy

Optimism

They can imagine the world from multiple perspectives — those of colleagues, clients, end users, and customers (current and prospective). By taking a “people first” approach, design thinkers can imagine solutions that are inherently desirable and meet explicit or latent needs. Great design thinkers observe the world in minute detail. They notice things that others do not and use their insights to inspire innovation.

They assume that no matter how challenging the constraints of a given problem, at least one potential solution is better than the existing alternatives.

Integrative thinking They not only rely on analytical processes (those that produce either/or choices) but also exhibit the ability to see all of the salient — and sometimes contradictory — aspects of a confounding problem and create novel solutions that go beyond and dramatically improve on existing alternatives (see Roger Martin’s The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking).

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Experimentalism Significant innovations don’t come from incremental tweaks. Design thinkers pose questions and explore constraints in creative ways that proceed in entirely new directions.

Collaboration The increasing complexity of products, services, and experiences has replaced the myth of the lone creative genius with the reality of the enthusiastic interdisciplinary collaborator. The best design thinkers don’t simply work alongside other disciplines; many of them have significant experience in more than one. At IDEO we employ people who are engineers and marketers, anthropologists and industrial designers, architects and psychologists.

TIM BROWN • DESIGN THINKING

“People think it’s this veneer, that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” Steve Jobs

expert, a process designer, a union representative, and designers from IDEO. This group worked with innovation teams of frontline practitioners in each of the four hospitals. During the earliest phase of the project, the core team collaborated with nurses to identify a number of problems in the way shift changes occurred. Chief among these was the fact that nurses routinely spent the first 45 minutes of each shift at the nurses’ station debriefing the departing shift about the status of patients. Their methods of information exchange were different in every hospital, ranging from recorded dictation to face-to-face conversations. And they compiled the information they needed to serve patients in a variety of ways — scrawling quick notes on the back of any available scrap of paper, for example, or even on their scrubs. Despite a significant investment of time, the nurses often failed to learn some of the things that mattered most to patients, such as how they had fared during the previous shift, which family members were with them, and whether or not certain tests or therapies had been administered. For many patients, the

team learned, each shift change felt like a hole in their care. Using the insights gleaned from observing these important times of transition, the innovation teams explored potential solutions through brainstorming and rapid prototyping. (Prototypes of a service innovation will of course not be physical, but they must be tangible. Because pictures help us understand what is learned through prototyping, we often videotape the performance of prototyped services). Prototyping doesn’t have to be complex and expensive. In another health care project, IDEO helped a group of surgeons develop a new device for sinus surgery. As the surgeons described the ideal physical characteristics of the instrument, one of the designers grabbed a whiteboard marker, a film canister, and a clothespin and taped them together. “Do you mean like this?” he asked. With his rudimentary prototype in hand, the surgeons were able to be much more precise about what the ultimate design should accomplish. Prototypes should command only as much time, effort, and investment as are needed to generate useful feedback and evolve an idea. The more “finished” a prototype seems, the less likely its creators will be to pay attention to and profit from feedback. ISSUE 11/ SPRING 2015

DESIGN THINKING • TIM BROWN

“Leaders now look to innovation as a principal source of differentiation and competitive advantage.”

The goal of prototyping isn’t to finish. It is to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of the idea and to identify new directions that further prototypes might take. The design that emerged for shift changes had nurses passing on information in front of the patient rather than at the nurses’ station. In only a week the team built a working prototype that included new procedures and some simple soft ware with which nurses could call up previous shift-change notes and add new ones. They could input patient information throughout a shift rather than scrambling at the end to pass it on. The software collated the data in a simple format customized for each nurse at the start of a shift. The result was both higher-quality knowledge transfer and reduced prep time, permitting much earlier and betterinformed contact with patients. As Kaiser measured the impact of this change over time, it learned that the mean interval between a nurse’s arrival and first interaction with a patient had been more than halved, adding a huge amount of nursing time across the four hospitals. Perhaps just as important was the effect on the quality of the nurses’ work ISSUE 11/ SPRING 2015

experience. One nurse commented, “I’m an hour ahead, and I’ve only been here 45 minutes.” Another said, “[This is the] first time I’ve ever made it out of here at the end of my shift.” Thus did a group of nurses significantly improve their patients’ experience while also improving their own job satisfaction and productivity. By applying a human-centered design methodology, they were able to create a relatively small process innovation that produced an outsize impact. The new shift changes are being rolled out across the Kaiser system, and the capacity to reliably record critical patient information is being integrated into an electronic medical records initiative at the company. What might happen at Kaiser if every nurse, doctor, and administrator in every hospital felt empowered to tackle problems the way this group did? To find out, Kaiser has created the Garfield Innovation Center, which is run by Kaiser’s original core team and acts as a consultancy to the entire organization. The center’s mission is to pursue innovation that enhances the patient experience and, more broadly, to envision Kaiser’s “hospital of the future.” It is introducing tools for design thinking across the Kaiser system.

TIM BROWN • DESIGN THINKING

How to Make Design Thinking Part of the Innovation Drill Begin at the beginning

Blend big and small projects.

Involve design thinkers at the very start of the innovation process, before any direction has been set. Design thinking will help you explore more ideas more quickly than you could otherwise.

Manage a portfolio of innovation that stretches from shorter-term incremental ideas to longer-term revolutionary ones. Expect business units to drive and fund incremental innovation, but be willing to initiate revolutionary innovation from the top.

Take a human-centered approach. Along with business and technology considerations, innovation should factor in human behavior, needs, and preferences. Human-centered design thinking — especially when it includes research based on direct observation — will capture unexpected insights and produce innovation that more precisely reflects what consumers want.

Try early and often. Create an expectation of rapid experimentation and prototyping. Encourage teams to create a prototype in the first week of a project. Measure progress with a metric such as average time to first prototype or number of consumers exposed to prototypes during the life of a program.

Seek outside help. Expand the innovation ecosystem by looking for opportunities to co-create with customers and consumers. Exploit Web 2.0 networks to enlarge the effective scale of your innovation team.

Budget to the pace of innovation. Design thinking happens quickly, yet the route to market can be unpredictable. Don’t constrain the pace at which you can innovate by relying on cumbersome budgeting cycles. Be prepared to rethink your funding approach as projects proceed and teams learn more about opportunities.

Find talent any way you can. Look to hire from interdisciplinary programs like the new Institute of Design at Stanford and progressive business schools like Rotman, in Toronto. People with more conventional design backgrounds can push solutions far beyond your expectations. You may even be able to train nondesigners with the right attributes to excel in design-thinking roles.

Design for the cycle. In many businesses people move every 12 to 18 months. But design projects may take longer than that to get from day one through implementation. Plan assignments so that design thinkers go from inspiration to ideation to implementation. Experiencing the full cycle builds better judgment and creates great long-term benefits for the organization.

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Move on to the next project, repeat

HOW DESIGN THINKING HAPPENS The myth of creative genius is resilient: We believe that great ideas pop fully formed out of brilliant minds, in feats of imagination well beyond the abilities of mere mortals. But what the Kaiser nursing team accomplished was neither a sudden breakthrough nor the lightning strike of genius; it was the result of hard work augmented by a creative human-centered discovery process and followed by iterative cycles of prototyping, testing, and refinement. The design process is best described metaphorically as a system of spaces rather than a predefined series of orderly steps. The spaces demarcate different sorts of related activities that togetherform the continuum of innovation. Design thinking can feel chaotic to those experiencing it for the first time. But over the life of a project participants come to see — as they did at Kaiser — that the process makes sense and achieves results, even though its architecture differs from the linear, milestone-based processes typical of other kinds of business activities. Design projects must ultimately pass through three spaces. We label these “inspiration,” for the circumstances (be they a problem, an opportunity, or both) that motivate the search for solutions; “ideation,” for the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas that may lead to solutions; and “implementation,” for the charting of a path to market. Projects will loop back through these spaces — particularly the first two — more than once as ideas are refined and new directions taken. Sometimes the trigger for a project is leadership’s recognition of a serious change in business fortunes. In 2004 Shimano, a Japanese manufacturer of bicycle components, faced flattening growth in its traditional high-end road racing and mountain-bike segments in the United States. The company had always relied on technology innovations to drive its growth and naturally tried to predict where the next one might come from. This time Shimano thought a high-end casual bike that appealed to boomers would be an interesting area to explore. IDEO was invited to collaborate on the project.

Make the case to the business, spread the word

W W W (

Help marketing design a communication strategy

EXECUTE THE VISION Engineer the experience

Prototype some more, test with users, test internally communicate internally. don’t workd in the darkk!

tell more stories (they keep ideas alive) Prototype, test, prototype, test...

Aply integrative thinking

Put customers in hthe midst of everything; describe their journeys

Build creative frameworks (order out chaos)

Make many sketches, concoct scenarios

BRAINSTORM

During the inspiration phase, an interdisciplinary team of IDEO and Shimano people — designers, behavioral scientists, marketers, and engineers — worked to identify appropriate constraints for the project. The team began with a hunch that it should focus more broadly than on the high-end market, which might prove to be neither the only nor even the best source of new growth. So it set out to learn why 90% of American adults don’t ride bikes. Looking for new ways to think about the problem, the team members spent time with all kinds of consumers. They discovered that nearly everyone they met rode a bike as a child and had happy memories of doing so. ISSUE 11/ SPRING 2015

O s (

TIM BROWN • DESIGN THINKING

EXPECT SUCCESS

build implementation resources into your plan

What’s the bussiness problem? Where’s the opportunity? What has changed (or soon may change)?

Look at the world: Observe what people do, how they think, what they need and want

They also discovered that many Americans are intimidated by cycling today — by the retail experience (including the young, Lycraclad athletes who serve as sales staff in most independent bike stores); by the complexity and cost of the bikes, accessories, and specialized clothing; by the danger of cycling on roads not designed for bicycles; and by the demands of maintaining a technically sophisticated bike that is ridden infrequently. This human-centered exploration — which took its insights from people outside Shimano’s core customer baseled to the realization that a whole new category of bicycling might be able to reconnect American consumers to their experiences as children while also dealing with the root causes of their feelings of intimidation — thus revealing a large untapped market.

What are the bussiness constraints (time, lack of resources, impoverished customer base, shrinking market?

Envolve many disciplines from the start (e.g. engineering & marketing)

Pay attention to “extreme” users such as children or the eldery

The design team, responsible for every aspect of what was envisioned as a holistic experience, came up with the concept of “Coasting.” Coasting would aim to entice lapsed bikers into an activity that was simple, straight forward, and fun. Coasting bikes, built more for pleasure than for sport, would have no controls on the handlebars, no cables snaking along the frame. As on the earliest bikes many of us rode, the brakes would be applied by backpedaling. With the help of an onboard computer, a minimalist three gears would shift automatically as the bicycle gained speed or slowed. The bikes would feature comfortably padded seats, be easy to operate, and require relatively little maintenance.

Three major manufacturers — Trek, Raleigh, and Giant — developed new bikes incorporating innovative components from Shimano. But the design team didn’t stop with the bike itself. In store retailing strategies were created for independent bike dealers, in part to alleviate the discomfort that biking novices felt in stores designed to serve enthusiasts. The team developed a brand that identified Coasting as a way to enjoy life. (“Chill. Explore. Dawdle. Lollygag. First one there’s a rotten egg.”) And it designed a public relations campaign — in collaboration with local governments and cycling organizations — that identified safe places to ride.

Have a project room where you can share insights, tell stories

How Are and the

can technology help? valuable ideas, assets, expertise hiding inside business?

Or Organize O information and s sy synthetize possibilities ( (tell more stories!)

Although many others became involved in the project when it reached the implementation phase, the application of design thinking in the earliest stages of innovation is what led to this complete solution. Indeed, the single thing one would have expected the design team to be responsible for – the look of the bikes – was intentionally deferred to later in the development process, when the team created a reference design to inspire the bike companies’ own design teams. After a successful launch in 2007, seven more bicycle manufacturers signed up to produce Coasting bikes in 2008.

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DESIGN THINKING • TIM BROWN

TAKING A SYSTEMS VIEW Many of the world’s most successful brands create breakthrough ideas that are inspired by a deep understanding of consumers’ lives and use the principles of design to innovate and build value. Sometimes innovation has to account for vast differences in cultural and socioeconomic conditions. In such cases design thinking can suggest creative alternatives to the assumptions made in developed societies.

company faces is logistic: how best to deliver eye care to populations far removed from the urban centers where Aravind’s hospitals are located. Aravind calls itself an “eye care system” for a reason: Its business goes beyond ophthalmic care per se to transmit expert practice to populations that have historically lacked access. The company saw its network of hospitals as a beginning rather than an end.

India’s Aravind Eye Care System is probably the world’s largest provider of eye care. From April 2006 to March 2007 Aravind served more than 2.3 million patients and performed more than 270,000 surgeries. Founded in 1976 by Dr. G. Venkataswamy, Aravind has as its mission nothing less than the eradication of needless blindness among India’s population, including the rural poor, through the effective delivery of superior ophthalmic care. (One of the company’s slogans is “Quality is for everyone.”) From 11 beds in Dr. Venkataswamy’s home, Aravind has grown to encompass five hospitals (three others are under Aravind management), a plant that manufactures ophthalmic products, a research foundation, and a training center.

Much of its innovative energy has focused on bringing both preventive care and diagnostic screening to the countryside. Since 1990 Aravind has held “eye camps” in India’s rural areas, in an effort to register patients, administer eye exams, teach eye care, and identify people who may require surgery or advanced diagnostic services or who have conditions that warrant monitoring.

Aravind’s execution of its mission and model is in some respects reminiscent of Edison’s holistic concept of electric power delivery. The challenge the ISSUE 11/ SPRING 2015

In 2006 and early 2007 Aravind eye camps screened more than 500,000 patients, of whom nearly 113,000 required surgery. Access to transportation is a common problem in rural areas, so the company provides buses that take patients needing further treatment to one of its urban facilities and then home again. Over the years it has bolstered its diagnostic capabilities in the field with telemedicine trucks, which enable doctors back at Aravind’s hospitals to participate in care decisions.

In recent years Aravind’s analysis of its screening data has led to specialized eye camps for certain demographic groups, such as school age children and industrial and government workers; the company also holds camps specifically to screen for eye diseases associated with diabetes. All these services are free for the roughly 60% of patients who cannot afford to pay. In developing its system of care, Aravind has consistently exhibited many characteristics of design thinking. It has used as a creative springboard two constraints: the poverty and remoteness of its clientele and its own lack of access to expensive solutions. For example, a pair of intraocular lenses made in the West costs $200, which severely limited the number of patients Aravind could help. Rather than try to persuade suppliers to change the way they did things, Aravind built its own solution: a manufacturing plant in the basement of one of its hospitals. It eventually discovered that it could use relatively inexpensive technology to produce lenses for $4 a pair. Throughout its history — defined by the constraints of poverty, ignorance, and an enormous unmet need — Aravind has built a systemic solution to a complex social and medical problem.

TIM BROWN • DESIGN THINKING

“Many of the world’s most successful brands create breakthrough ideas that are inspired by a deep understanding of consumers’ lives and use the principles of design to innovate and build value.”

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DESIGN THINKING • TIM BROWN

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TIM BROWN • DESIGN THINKING

GETTING BACK TO THE SURFACE I argued earlier that design thinking can lead to innovation that goes beyond aesthetics, but that doesn’t mean that form and aesthetics are unimportant. Magazines like to publish photographs of the newest, coolest products for a reason: They are sexy and appeal to our emotions. Great design satisfies both our needs and our desires. Often the emotional connection to a product or an image is what engages us in the first place. Time and again we see successful products that were not necessarily the first to market but were the first to appeal to us emotionally and functionally. In other words, they do the job and we love them. The iPod was not the first MP3 player, but it was the first to be delightful. Target’s products appeal emotionally through design and functionally through price — simultaneously. This idea will grow ever more important in the future. As Daniel Pink writes in his book A Whole New Mind, “Abundance has satisfied, and even over-satisfied, the material needs of millions – boosting the significance of beauty and emotion and accelerating individuals’ search for meaning.” As more of our basic needs are met, we increasingly expect sophisticated experiences that are emotionally satisfying and meaningful.

These experiences will not be simple products. They will be complex combinations of products, services, spaces, and information. They will be the ways we get educated, the ways we are entertained, the ways we stay healthy, the ways we share and communicate. Design thinking is a tool for imagining these experiences as well as giving them a desirable form. One example of experiential innovation comes from a financial services company. In late 2005 Bank of America launched a new savings account service called “Keep the Change.” IDEO, working with a team from the bank, helped identify a consumer behavior that many people will recognize: After paying cash for something, we put the coins we received in change into a jar at home. Once the jar is full, we take the coins to the bank and deposit them in a savings account. For many people, it’s an easy way of saving. Bank of America’s innovation was to build this behavior into a debit card account. Customers who use their debit cards to make purchases can now choose to have the total rounded up to the nearest dollar and the difference deposited in their savings accounts. The success of this innovation lay in its appeal to an instinctive desire we have to put money aside in a painless and

invisible way. Keep the Change creates an experience that feels natural because it models behavior that many of us already exhibit. To be sure, Bank of America sweetens the deal by matching 100% of the change saved in the first three months and 5% of annual totals (up to $250) thereafter. This encourages customers to try it out. But the real payoff is emotional: the gratification that comes with monthly statements showing customers they’ve saved money without even trying. In less than a year the program attracted 2.5 million customers. It is credited with 700,000 new checking accounts and a million new savings accounts. Enrollment now totals more than 5 million people who together have saved more than $500 million. Keep the Change demonstrates that design thinking can identify an aspect of human behavior and then convert it into both a customer benefit and a business value. •

ISSUE 11/ SPRING 2015

Stress is a well-known creativity killer, says psychologist Robert Epstein, PhD. Time constraints are another. Unfortunately, graduate school has both in spades, and that can sap the inspiration of even the most imaginative students. “When you’re in graduate school, there are so many constraints on you. It’s detrimental to creative expression,” says Epstein, author of The Big Book of Creativity Games (McGraw-Hill, 2000). Yet it’s almost impossible to conquer any graduate school activity without at least some innovative thinking. Collaborating with other researchers, finding a subfield that excites you, maneuvering your way through an unexpected set of findings, and balancing the demands of your work and home life all require creative problem-solving. Despite the widely held belief that some people just aren’t endowed with the creativity gene, “There’s not really any evidence that one person is inherently more creative than another,” Epstein says. Instead, creativity is something that anyone can cultivate.

The science of creativity Empirically backed tips to capture your next big idea by Amy Novotney

Image above: Serial Cut Vacation Cub Campain ISSUE 11/ SPRING 2015

Surround yourself with interesting things and people Regular dinners with diverse and interesting friends and a work space festooned with out-of-the-ordinary objects will help you develop more original ideas. You can also keep your thoughts lively by taking a trip to an art museum or attending an opera — anything that stimulates new thinking.

HAPPY, RESTED AND BRIGHT Sleep on it In a 1993 study at Harvard Medical School, psychologist Deidre Barrett, PhD, asked her students to imagine a problem they were trying to solve before going to sleep and found that they were able to come up with novel solutions in their dreams. In the study, published in Dreaming (Vol. 3, No. 2), half of the participants reported having dreams that addressed their chosen problems, and a quarter came up with solutions in their dreams. Collaborate — in writing Plucker notes that much psychological research has shown that we overestimate the success of group brainstorming. Instead of working together to generate great ideas, group members often fail to share their ideas for fear of rejection. Yet research led by psychologist Paul Paulus, PhD, of the University of Texas at Arlington, points to the surprising effectiveness of group “brainwriting,” in which group members write their ideas on paper and pass them to others in the group who then add their own ideas to the list. Group members tend to build off one another’s ideas, leading to increased creativity and innovation.

ROUTINE CREATIVITY Capture your new ideas Keep an idea notebook or voice recorder with you, type in new thoughts on your laptop or write ideas down on a napkin. Seek out challenging tasks Take on projects that don’t necessarily have a solution— such as trying to figure out how to make your dog fly or how to build a perfect model of the brain. This causes old ideas to compete, which helps generate new ones. Broaden your knowledge Take a class outside you’re working field or read journals in unrelated fields. This makes more diverse knowledge available for interconnection, which is the basis for all creative thought.

Let the sunshine in Spending time in natural settings may boost creativity. Get happy Sadness inhibits new ideas. This may be because when people are sad, they are more wary of making mistakes and exercise more restraint. Past research also supports the creativity boost gained from happiness. Compared with people in sad or neutral moods, those in happy moods are better at coming up with unusual word associations, developing patient diagnoses, solving moral dilemmas, generating story endings and writing numerous answers to divergent thinking tasks. To avoid being overly cautious and stagnant in their work, it’s recommended that students remember to have fun. “Take a walk, see a comedy, go out with a friend,” she says. “These breaks may help you feel better and see your work in a new light.” • ISSUE 11/ SPRING 2015

UNDERSTAND, VISUALIZE, SURVIVE • MAX GADNEY

UNDERSTAND,

Our future depends on finding answers in data. Climate science, economics and genetics all present us with problems that are solvable in part through the right visualisation of their complexity. Think how the film An Inconvenient Truth brought the detail of global warming to life and allowed Al Gore to tell his story without baffling people with numbers. The skills that information designers possess are arguably the most important in the design industry. Without them we cannot understand new ideas, and if we cannot understand we cannot learn and if we cannot learn we perish.

ISSUE 11/ SPRING 2015

The world is changing rapidly. In the past, most of what needed to be designed was edited by the client before being passed over to the designer. Nowadays, the stuff to be designed is often raw data, unintelligible to many clients themselves. To work with this, designers must have some grasp of disciplines such as information architecture, data science and statistics. Yet if you look around the graphic design degree shows, it is obvious that the majority of students haven’t heard of, yet alone worked in, any aspect of information design or data-visualisation. This seems

particularly short-sighted given the manifold benefits of setting information design briefs. Envisioning the future While the rest of graphic design worries about falling budgets and crowd-sourcing, data-products — and those who can make them — are in demand. Look at Berg’s BBC Dimensions, which can demonstrate the scale of an event such as the Pakistan flood area or the Gulf oil spill by overlaying it on the user’s postcode, or its Schooloscope, which turns dull government data into a useful application for parents. Stamen’s Mapumental for Channel 4 changes how we use local cartography and its Eddy tracks Twitter activity for MTV. Start-ups and traditional companies alike are aware of the need for a usable — possibly even delightful — window on their data. Yet this growth area is ignored by most design degree courses in their

MAX GADNEY • UNDERSTAND, VISUALIZE, SURVIVE

VISUALIZE, formal programming. Information design briefs force students to look at the subject to be communicated, rather than obsessing over an instant stylistic fix. The link between the content and its form is obvious in these briefs — any ‘solution’ that ignores the content is accordingly weak. Forget ‘problem solving’ — let students learn to articulate the problem first. Christopher Alexander, the author of The Timeless Way of Building (1979), an architecture book that has influenced many other fields, defines a designer as an egoless ‘medium’ who works by understanding and harnessing the forces around a problem. Information design briefs demand this explicitly. There is no room for ego when understanding is the priority. Confidence with the content leads to better relationships with the clients and better solutions. I am staggered at how many designers do not understand the businesses whose

work they represent. They then wonder why the clients treat them as ‘Mac men’. How many newsroom designers can discuss the significance of Balochistan to the 2010 Afghan conflict? How many designers of a broadcaster’s annual report could tell you about the world of converged media? Designers need the credibility of the boardroom and they only get this by understanding the boardroom’s business. The ‘science bit’ But there are many cultural barriers to this subject being taught now and most come from within the design industry. There are plenty of visual stylists or illustrators who appropriate the aesthetic of information design to give their work authority. Many books on the subject are little more than visually appealing data-art masquerading as purposeful and understandable communication. The air of integrity sought by these

faux ‘infographics’ is like ‘the science bit’ in shampoo commercials. This work seduces with allusions to purpose and process, like a child busily crayoning a piece of paper from top to bottom. As a result, students frequently find it hard to think past the visual layer. It is quite common for students to see ‘design research’ as a trip to the library to look for rare patterns or visual devices. If it does not occur to them that they do not understand the audiences, context or business goals behind briefs — don’t blame them, blame lazy teaching and directionless briefs. And pity the poor tutor trying to encourage interest in proper design role-models when the design media focus on celebrity designers, who rarely have the level of insight to match the column inches required. Visions of singular genius are not helpful to those who will need to collaborate with many. ISSUE 11/ SPRING 2015

UNDERSTAND, VISUALIZE, SURVIVE • MAX GADNEY

SURVIVE. by Max Gadney

Max Gadney is the Founder and Design Director at After the Flood. They are a Data Experience Design company that make sapps, interfaces and video, helping clients communicate information internally or to their customers. www.aftertheflood.co

Anecdotal and subjective musings inspire only egos, where instead insight is required to encourage the intellect of impressionable students. The solution lies in changing the structure of courses and devising decent briefs. Design courses should acknowledge the vocational disciplines within visual communication and teach accordingly. Graphic design should be solely a course label, with titles that are agreed across the entire discipline. A ‘visual stylism discipline’ should concentrate on the motifs sought by art-directors and corporations. Motion designers should learn about narrative arcs and storytelling. Information design modules will teach understanding and accessible communication. Maths as well as poetry. These modules should celebrate their differences and individual skillsets rather than the ill-defined, soupy ‘visual communications’ tag. This is a banner for studio-ready generica. ISSUE 11/ SPRING 2015

Most self-initiated projects have the substance of a napkin and look to fashion to provide their meaning. This is no way to prepare talented young people for a world that gets less welcoming with every slew of graduation ceremonies. The information design brief needs some thinking, too. I would do a basic print brief to expose basic Tuftian graphic issues, followed by a second digital data brief that explores the specific needs of audience focus, designing with data and interaction design. There should be a real end result — a charity poster, a civic architectural work, a digital news story — to concentrate the mind on the end-user. The tutor should provide the data for presentation. Some will argue that students should initiate research themselves. I believe that if they are given some relevant data, they can always find more. And, besides, they are students and this will all be quite

new to them; they need a steer, not more ‘self-direction’. It need not look like double maths – the tutor should be able to weave in enough poetry to entice students. In short, information design should be a compulsory part of every graphic design course. The student will benefit from better analytical skills and a sense of the methods and materials of the modern workplace. Information designers bridge many of the new economy’s disciplines and will be well placed for work and influence in the coming decades. •

Locative Media

Character Substitution ASCII

Text Files

Graph structure Text modeling

Enlightenment studies

Russian media Deformance

Agent Based Modeling

Digital museum

Chechnya

Data Mining Computational Analysis Willa Cather

Corpus-based linguistics STYLEMETRICS Stephen Ramsay

Intellectual history

Active authentication

World history

Cognitive science

Leishu

Cultural transfer United States

Gender

Literary Fiction Systemic functional linguistics Virginia Woolf

Semantic text mining Public discourse

Religion

Dissemination of DH

Recherche

Word disambiguation

Media history

Curriculum development

Positive psychology Organizational capacity

Happiness

Digitizing Style

Named entity recognition

Modern manuscripts

Buddhism

Textual scholarship Co-occurrence

Computational narrative

Play

User needs Actor–network theory

Analysis of associated words

Social culture and knowledge

Natural History of Digital Art language processing

Information infrastructure Critical theory

Palimpsests

Hybrid edition Semantic Drift

Knowledge Engineering History of Art

Text Mining

Natural lighting effects Medieval manuscripts

Orthography

Drama Early modern studies

Archaeoastronomy Church decoration

Digital Preservation

Représentation des connaissances

Fellowship

Corpus

Inexact Quotations

Author right

Cairo Genizah

Association rules

DH Centers

Saints

Discourse

Digital pedagogy Teaching methods Orphaned works

Scholarship

Digital publishing Text collation

Terminology

Electronic provision

IPR

Timelines

Castle of Perseverance

Middle East

Audience

Alt-ac

Entity linking

Humanism

Web Logs

Sources

Transformation Islamic Classroom

Pathway Memory

Institutions

Content

GLAM

Document images Tenure and promotion

Cultural

Peer-reviewing

Casta painting

Spanish and Portuguese Digital methods

Curation

XVIII century art

Digital Libraries

User Requirements

State

Sovereignty

Sibling/Compatriot

Reconstruction

Fuzzy data

Latent information

Reading Physical and digital environments

Text interpretation Text network analysis SylvaDB

Facial attractiveness

Legal documents XML-TEI

Data analysis

Textual zoom

Symmetry Text summarisation

Beauty

European Integration Studies

Face perception Droit Tradition orale

Digital Dante Alighieri Encyclopedia Knowledge Representation

Taiwan Tombstones Time

Temporal modeling

Ancestral Nation/Fatherland Semantic Network

Place

Digital Humanities 2014

representing a controverted definition by Dario Rodighiero, DHLab, EPFL In July, Lausanne will host the international Digital Humanities 2014 conference. The event will offer the opportunity to meet people involved in this domain, but what exactly does Digital Humanities represent? Assuming that people attending the conference represent the domain itself, keywords used in the accepted submissions have been chosen to represent the Digital Humanities community.

The network portrayed here is composed of all keywords that describe the accepted papers and posters. Two keywords are connected if they are used in the same paper. An edge's weight is given by the number of papers using these two keywords. Furthermore, to increase the depth of layers, edge thickness has been intensified according to the number of authors creating these pairs, emphasizing their voices.

Data criticism

Fluid text theory

Text encoding

Graph Database

Scholarly primitives

Data curation EHRI

Library science

Longitudinal study

Venice Object relational database

Laser scanning

Textual transmission

Digital geography

Maritime routes

Events

Textual

Documentation

Pattern recognition

MOOC

DigitalInfrastructure Research Infrastructure Research Data and Technical

Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival Resources

Global Outlook::Digital Humanities Digital collation Cultural gap

Peer-grading

Data Modelling

NER

Philippe Starck presented his squeezer, Juicy Salif, not just as a means to squeeze lemons, but to start conversations. Likewise with this network, the data visualization can be used to discuss and to reflect upon the definition of Digital Humanities. People could discuss the reason why an article is detached from the majority, or can identify the hubs: the keywords that have been used most often.

Silk Road

Non-textual source Interpretation of maps

Corpus studies

Face recognition

Open

Visual

Morphological analysis Old Japanese

Spanish America Depictions of race

Old French Humanities Data Center

Information visualization WissKI

Formation supérieure

History of science

Physical landscape model3D printing Early modern europe

Cultural critique

Globalisation

Historical databases

Grading Teaching

Digital research methods International community

Data

Digital multi-text editions

Visual culture

Historical GIS

Metainformation

Data curation education

NeDiMAH Europeana Cloud

Dialogue Book viewers Teaching and research

Phylogenetic analysis

Impact

Research

Web application Journals Digital cultural empowerment

ARIADNE

Speech

Formal data modelling Spatial history

Persons

Digital infrastructures

Handwritten text

Oralité

Local studies Thought Writing representation

Computational models Representation

Economic gap Economic history

Online

Project design Agency

Image Search

Computer Vision

Collaborative platform

E-learning

RDF

Projet

Shakespeare

Geospatial

Medieval legal charters

Digital humanities data curation

DARIAH

Digital Resources

Semantic web

Maps

Dispositif hybride

TIC

Image markup

Resource sharing

Markup

Digital historical atlas Interdisciplinarity

Networks

Human-machine Interaction

Data Federation

Image Processing

XBRL

Architecture

Integration

Edition

Historical texts

American studies

Digital Archives

EpiDoc

DH Community

User studies

Accounting documents

XSLT

Virtual research environments

Generic Search

Community heritage

Thesauri

Intelligent search

Scholarly editing

History of philosophy

Institutional structures Archiving

Web 2.0

Maya hieroglyphics Comparable corpora

Discovery Medieval documents

Network-building

TXSTEP

Digital edition

API

Cultural studies Christian Arabic literature

Music

Epigraphy

Digital History

Computational philology

Crosswalks

Early Geospatial Documents Radio bulletins

Historical Persons

OWL

Art

Open data Knowledge organization

Algorithms

Recommendations

Multilingual

MySQL

Cultural institution Revenue model

Ancient Egypt Sustainability Muslims websites

Diversity Community

Argumentativity

Long-term access

Photography

Linguistic annotation

DH pedagogy

Library catalog data

Deliberation

Licensing

Content-based image retrieval Multimodal data

Historiography

Ontology

Digital collectionsIncompleteness

Barcode Neostructuralism

Tacit knowledge

Sign Language

Publishing

Versioning

History of the book

Notation Informatics

Storage

New Testament

Papyrology

Historical sciences

Verse

Repertoire

CIDOC

Long-term preservation Digital Humanities

Analysis

Corpus research

Digital archiving

Open access

Web framework

Typesetting

Avant-garde

Jigsaw puzzles

Caribbean studies Migration Undergraduate education

Enriched publication

Tibetan texts Cochran-Mantel-Haenszel test

Critical editions

Digitisation

Kiln

Community building Greek

WebProtégé

Metrics

Linked Data Europeana

Absence

Manuscripts

Magazines Named entities

Lab

Transliteration

Hmong

Theology Interdisciplinary collaboration

Digital Maps Collaborative

History of Science

Bible Sparse features

Best Practices

French Drama Methods

Tool building

Open linked data

Undergraduate

Vocation

Location Language technology

Infrastructure Curriculum

Student Scholarship Logistic Regression Data sharing

Ergonomics

Joins

Antiquity

Parliamentary debates Easter 1916 Speech processing Design Empowerment

Digital prosopography TEI XML

TEI

OCR

Digitial Humanities Visualization

Crowdfunding

Digital tools

Historical researchBibliography

Transactions

Historical financial records

Sacred

Video

Interface design

Information Retrieval

Narratology

Faculty-student collaboration

Community outreach

Audiovisual material

Computer vision

Writing

Dataspaces

Database

Tool development

TEI Encoding

Linked Open Data

Interoperability

Language resources

Ensemble

Born digital material

MIT

Prosopography Comparing editions Open Source

Word-class system Woodblock

Print edition

Participation

Project Management

Virtual laboratories

Cinema

Repository

Instruction

Hackathon

Tagged corpus Language processing tools

NYPL

Image matching

Russia

Multiplicity

Text representation

MeCab

Metadata standards Digital work environment

Automated annotation

Empowerment

Emblem

Programs

Multimodal Database modelling

Crowdsourcing

Historical documents

History

Data visualization

Building

Software development

Obsolescence

Literary Genre

Texométre

Computer modeling

Theatre history

Reusability

Typeface

Metadata correction Document editing Cultural Heritage

XML

Chinese Studies

Renaissance studies Workset Creation

Android

Facial recognition

Website

Ajax

Multimedia

Cultural Preservation Education

Software-development

Interactive Installation

MARC

Standards

Critical thinking

Precomputation Single-page application

Digital cultural heritage Digital scholarly edition

HathiTrust

Theatre

Database management

Spatial humanities

Tool

Coding

Coptic

Medieval

Virtual reconstructions

Editing

Digital mapping

Electronic Literature

Linguistics

Restitution archéologique

Low Countries

Data linking

Digital access

Interpretation

Archival Research

Data mining

Openness

Preservation

Spatial

Media visualization

Pre-processing

Historical thinking

Conferencing

Philosophy

Archaeology

Letters

Collaboration

Forensics

Cluster Analysis

3D modeling

Web archiving

Cloud

Correcting text

Outreach

Software

Grants

Sound

James Joyce

Secondary analysis

Redes científicas

Ethics

Diagnosis

Visualization

Egypt

Network analysis

Institutional criticism Physical collation

Historical Languages

Pedagogy

German

Virtual realityAugmented reality

Research infrastructure

3D visualization Annotation

Media archaeology Post-processing

Interface

Usability

Design

Flann O'Brien

Digital art history Sistemas de ConocimientoQualitative data

Validation

Rolling Delta Framework

Dance

Metadata