What business can learn from the greatest game on earth.

If you look at the history of soccer for groundbreaking, "game-changing" innovations, you realize they have been scarce; by and large the game hasn't evolved much. Some innovations resulted from a changing of the rules. Most of them, however, were driven by either organizational or individual excellence. For example, there is the position of the "libero," the "sweeper" before the goal-keeper who, freed from marking a direct opponent, was mandated with opening a team's game from deep in its own territory; the allure of the "playmaker"; the introduction of a three-man defense row in the 1990s; the "Sweeper-Keeper" performing the defensive actions of a libero; the increased importance of the "six," the defensive holding midfielder; and the Dutch "Total Football" concept, with its fluid, attacking 4-5-1 and 3-2-5 formations.

As in business, soccer innovation is deeply rooted in its culture. Starting in their youth education, great teams establish a distinct style that sets them apart from mediocre ones. Almost always, these styles have been shaped by a city, a region, or a nation. Ajax Amsterdam and the Dutch school of "Total Football"—considered by many to be the most sophisticated and most influential soccer philosophy in recent times—can be traced back to historical, geographical, and socio-cultural factors. To see how innovation happens, let's look at some examples.

Total Football was the first multidisciplinary approach to playing soccer. It implied that all players can play in all positions and should have comparable levels of fitness, technical ability, and awareness. It is focused on the creation of space on offense and the destruction of space on defense. The result is maximum flexibility, a strong element of surprise, and the ability to exert pressure on any of the opponent's moves, at any time during the game. Besides Ajax, a number of British clubs including Arsenal London and Manchester United have embraced and refined Total Football, and so has FC Barcelona, with its strong tradition of Dutch coaches and players.

In stark contrast, the so-called "catenaccio" (literally translated, "door-bolt"), a rather static, defensive-minded tactic, is the hallmark of most Italian clubs. Some contend this goes all the way back to the Roman Empire and its poise to defend its borders, but I'm not sure if I buy into this explanation: Even the Roman Empire, in order to become an empire, had to conquer territory first, no? In any case, the point is that soccer tactics and styles are linked to culture. (To learn more about the cultural and religious underpinnings of soccer, read How Football Explains the World, by Franklin Foer.)

And yet, only a few soccer pundits would dispute that the most critical innovation in football occurs on the individual level. While some herald the "star is the team" philosophy and praise the power of the collective, it is more plausible to uphold the "whole is more than the sum of its parts" argument precisely because some of the parts—that is, certain individuals—are better than others. Although there are attempts underway to crowdsource soccer, the difference between a win and a loss is still marked by the quality of individuals: players, coaches, and, not to forget, referees.

Players and coaches are chased with tons of cash not merely because they are stars who are able to turn the game into a spectacle, but also because their individual decisions, be they strategic (coach) or opportunistic (player), decide over fortune and misfortune. Both coach and player are risk-taking entrepreneurs, and the more creativity they exhibit, the more freedom they're typically given.

Ultimately, the most visible and arguably most impactful innovation lies in the feet of the players. Notwithstanding the team's culture, strategic formation, and tactical fitness, innovation on a micro-level is still the biggest competitive advantage, and it is ingrained in soccer's DNA: Paul B. Paulus and Bernard Arjan Nijstad argue in their book Group Creativity: Innovation Through Collaboration that soccer offers more opportunities for creativity and innovation than baseball and other U.S. sports because the team's task is more "hierarchical, less sequential, and less cyclical." Furthermore, soccer players can innovate their game in every game. Here's what ex-Barca player Ronaldinho once said:

The important thing is to keep on innovating and finding a way to surprise. You always look to surprise, with dribbling, a new move, a new pass. (...) If you don't innovate, they all take the ball away from you. I believe it's important to innovate in order to avoid repetition.

As the World Cup enters its final game on Sunday, be sure to admire the poetic and sometimes melancholic Total Football of the Netherlands and Spain—and compare it to the prosaic, rather efficient style of Germany in Saturday's third-place match. And don't forget about how a few players tried to decide (or failed to decide) the game—namely Lionel Messi, the 21-year old Argentinean superstar. Soccer can be researched, carefully planned, and strategically devised—however, the most beautiful thing about this beautiful game is the fact that there is no lag between idea and implementation. Creativity can be immediately applied and has to be found on the pitch again and again. Every match is a blank slate. This is what business leaders can learn from soccer: Innovation is, literally, a "play," and the best players will win.

This piece originally appeared on design mind’s Total Football blog in June.

Photo by Sportsmyriad

An interview with author Jonathan Safran Foer about factory farms, vegetarianism, and Eating Animals.

design mind on GOOD is a series exploring the power of design by the editors of design mind magazine. This is the third installment in a miniseries within that blog that will explore the theme of work-life. The work-life series will run each Thursday for the next four weeks.

Shortly before Thanksgiving last year, I took a deep breath and called my mother and sister in successive order to tell them that I would not be eating turkey for the holiday. “Or any other meat for that matter,” I declared. “Ever.” I had just finished reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s book, Eating Animals, and it cinched my decision to go veggie.

My sister’s first reaction was to say that she could not cheat her 3-year old son out of the tradition of having a roast beast on the table. My mother, playing Switzerland, announced that everyone was entitled to their own opinion. I think my announcement surprised them. My subsequent conversations with family, friends, and co-workers certainly surprised me. With so much cultural attention paid over the past several years to slow food and eating locally, I could not get over how little most people knew (myself included) about the factory farm system in the United States.

Choosing not to eat meat is a surprisingly impactful decision. Before reading Foer’s book—his first nonfiction work since writing the novels Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close—I’d been a self-proclaimed “part-time vegetarian,” mostly because of stomach issues. I was unaware of the facts that factory-farmed meat is the leading cause of global warming in the world and that these places are incubators for some of the planet’s most potent and potentially disastrous diseases, such as the H1N1 virus. I did not realize that small family farms, the self-sustaining kind with chickens and goats and pigs and tractors‚ are nearly extinct. I certainly did not consider how horribly the animals are treated.

For me, and many people like me, I believed those concerns were reserved for the fringes of society. I was wrong, and the facts prove it. There is no greater mainstream issue than what we eat and where our food comes from. Right now, our current system is an environmental, biological, and ethical disaster. I recently asked Foer what, if anything, we can do about it.

SAM MARTIN: Not everyone is going to pick up a book called Eating Animals. What’s the best way to let people know about the damaging effects of factory farms without scaring them off?

JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER: It’s difficult. We’re so used to thinking of this as a divisive, accusatory, fight-inspiring conversation. And it’s a shame. Because I really do think that, if we had full access to what’s going on in factory farms, everyone would agree—and by agree, I don't mean that we all become vegetarians—that factory farming is a broken system that doesn't reflect our values. Who would want a farm system that is the leading cause of global warming? Or one of the two or three most damaging things to the environment? And who would want to treat animals in this way?

So the problem has been that it’s all been framed as this divisive, black-and-white issue. You’re either a vegetarian or you’re not. You either care or don’t. And that can put people who care in an exasperating place. I hope this book will allow us to think about food in the way we think about the environment. We can do things better than we’ve done them in the past.

SM: After reading about how entrenched, widespread, and damaging U.S. factory farming is—to the health of humans, animals, and the planet—changing the system seems like an insurmountable goal. Is it?

JSF: No. First of all, there are a number of things to remember. One is, it’s new. It’s only 50 years old. People have been farming in a different way for the past 10,000 years. The fact that it rose this quickly almost holds the promise that it can be dismantled just as quickly. Consumers have so much power in this situation. It’s rare that consumers have this much power. Farmers grow and produce what people ask for. As we ask for different things, they will farm different things. Finally, the demographics are compelling and promising in terms of who cares and who doesn’t. Eighteen percent of university students are now vegetarian. When that 18 percent starts to become the next generation of writers and doctors and farmers and other professionals, the conversation will feel very different than it might feel now.

SM: Eating locally farmed meat seems to be attracting a growing number of people. Is this a good alternative to eating factory farmed animals, or is it still a questionable practice?

JSF: I think there are two questions: “Is it good?” and “Is it perfect?” Local farming isn’t perfect, but it is so much better than what’s available in the mainstream. And it’s better in every single way—for humans, animals, the environment, global warming, and so on. Is it the answer? It’s part of the answer. Personally, I don’t get terribly excited about [locally farmed meat]. And I don’t eat it. I don’t believe it can be scaled. So to endorse it would be for personal reasons only. But most Americans fundamentally agree on the goals, which is to have farms that are better for human health. Some people have this belief that people are never going to move away from meat so they say, “Let’s have a decent farm system.” Other people say, “Let’s stop eating meat because we’re never going to have a good farming system.” I’m more in the second category. I think there are things we ought to agree on. We have to stop giving antibiotics to farm animals. We have to stop fishing the way we’re fishing. It won’t last. And I think we can all agree we shouldn’t keep pregnant pigs in cages so small they can’t turn around in them. That’s wrong. You don’t have to like pigs at all to know that. There comes a point when we have to decide what’s right and wrong.

SM: Even using the most humane animal slaughtering practices, farmers are still, in the end, killing. Can you explain why we ought to consider animal welfare in this debate?

JSF: I think we can’t help but consider it. If you saw someone kicking a dog, you might not intervene, but can you say you would be indifferent to it? Caring is a human instinct, and it goes against our nature not to care. I don’t love animals. I don’t think they should be treated as humans. There are irrational places that one can take one’s concern for animals, and I won’t go there. But it defies our human instincts to treat them as if they had no feeling‚ or as if that feeling had no effect. Killing animals is, in a way, the least bad thing that we do to them. If you ask the American public if it’s okay to kill animals for food, most would say yes. But if you ask them if it’s okay to remove appendages from an animal while it’s still alive or keep a pregnant pig in a cage that it can’t turn around in—are there really people who think that’s okay?

SM: One recurring subject in Eating Animals is the notion that people are nostalgic for food traditions (the Thanksgiving turkey is the most obvious example). This seems to be a big reason why many people are reluctant to give these foods up, even to the detriment of their health and the health of the planet. Why is it that virtually everything about storybook farms and the production of traditional foods has changed, yet the sentiment attached in consuming these foods has remained, even when people are educated about the horrors of modern animal agriculture? Why is there a disconnect?

JSF: I don’t think it’s a disconnect. Let’s give people the benefit of the doubt. They’re making a rational decision. They’re saying, “I know the process is not good, but I don’t care.” I would say, “Fine. Keep your barbecue on the Fourth of July, your Christmas ham, and your Thanksgiving turkey. But get rid of the meat that you don’t care about—the fast-food hamburger or the Chinese restaurant chicken." Nine-tenths of meat consumed is meat we don’t care about. What happens is that people take the exceptions to get them off the hook for the everyday. That’s where these conversations get skewed. When people talk about these exceptional uses of food, that’s right. They are exceptions. Let’s talk about the normal.

SM: You write a lot about traditions surrounding food in your own family. Since simultaneously becoming a father and a vegetarian, are there any new or modified food traditions you have started?

JSF: The only tradition we’ve started, I would say, is having a conversation around food. We hadn’t been doing that. We hadn’t been thinking about it. The fact that food now has a story served with it is different and good. It enhances the cultural value of food. All the good things we would miss [by not eating meat], we more than make up for with stories about why and what we don’t eat.

SM: For someone just being introduced to the factory-farm system in the United States, it can be hard to feel any hope that things will change. What are you excited about, and where do you find hope? What keeps you going?

JSF: I just read a recent poll that 70 percent of Americans are willing to spend more money for more ethically produced food. This isn’t San Francisco or New York; it’s the whole country. That’s an amazing number. People care about this stuff. Even if you don’t care, you have to care, because you have these annoying instincts. I think as our lines of sight are opened up, more people will think, “Hey, this is something we really want to know about.” And behavior changes will follow. And the 18 percent [in college right now] are tastemakers. As they get older, we will see vegetarianism in a new light.

A version of this piece appeared in the April 2010 issue of design mind magazine.

Photography by Gianluca Gentilini

Open work policies and empowered self-expression are the keys to unlocking innovation in modern corporations.

Did Johnny Damon really need to shave his beard to be a New York Yankee? Does facial hair affect his ability to hit or round the bases? Yes and no. There’s no difference in physical performance, but in order to play ball, Damon has to comply with the strict rules of the Yankees organization. Most corporations have organizational policies, including dress codes, that managers believe keep their operations moving along efficiently and consistently. But as the game changes, it might be time to loosen up and allow for more individuality within the world of business.

From Henry Ford’s assembly line to Motorola’s Six Sigma, the managerial ethos of the 20th century was a relentless pursuit of efficiency. Steps were clearly outlined, variances eliminated, and outliers quashed. Along the way, people were reduced to ID numbers, buttoned up in button-down shirts, and driven to finance the khaki industry.

Today, CEOs must highlight fast-moving innovation to be taken seriously. Perhaps it’s because over the past decade most of the lower-level business activities have already been outsourced. Or maybe it’s because consumers have been conditioned to want a new smart phone every 12 months. Whatever the reason, “innovation” is the biggest buzzword in business, and everyone wants more of it.

But companies grown to run with world-class efficiency are not necessarily well-equipped to be innovative. Rather than remove variances, innovative companies must seek out anomalies and champion risky ideas in order to turn them into breakthrough concepts. Ultimately‚ innovation is a creative activity—it’s fuzzy‚ complicated, and highly subjective—and it can’t be achieved by corporate mandate. So, instead of managing employees to be conformists and optimizers, companies need to empower their employees to think freely.

I suspect that's why business leaders have been looking to creative organizations to help them be more innovative. Companies such as frog design have always had “loose” cultures in which employees are free to think and dress as they please. A work environment where nonconformity is the norm and freethinking is encouraged helps to produce breakthrough ideas for clients. Moreover, the “creatives” who work at creative agencies naturally crave the freedom to be self-expressive, tend to be a little wacky by nature, and often are not comfortable in khakis. So companies based on creativity have typically been built to foster and encourage diversity, not to instill homogeneity.

In fact, creative types are often expected to look and dress differently. The first act of self-expression a person performs every day is selecting what to wear. If corporate policy forces clothing choices that do not mesh with a person’s personality, then the first thing that an employee does when they get home is change clothes. As they change their clothes, they change their mentality—and the types of ideas they generate.

Corporate dress codes put employees into a box, and a person can’t be expected to think outside that box if they are walking around all day in one. Innovative companies need to provide employees with the freedom to be who they want to be all day long. If employees are free to be who they truly are while they’re at work, then that means they are also free to bring work with them into their personal lives. Inspiration for innovation doesn’t only come between the hours of 9 and 5. Once the walls of organizational confinement begin to crumble, employees can blend their personal and work lives so that they may generate breakthrough ideas at any time from any place. Indeed, the truly innovative employees will be those who are exactly the same at home as they are at work.

Even daydreaming is something that may be worth encouraging and rewarding. A recent study from the University of British Columbia in Canada shows that a wandering mind can activate parts of the brain associated with problem-solving. (Maybe that’s why many great ideas occur in the shower.) By allowing creative employees to be freethinkers and pursue what interests them, companies gain access to a diverse set of invaluable precursors to innovative ideas.

While there is no single approach to unlocking creative thinking, it is more likely to happen in environments where personal constraints are minimized and employees are empowered to voice any wild idea they might have. Design firms have been doing this almost unintentionally for decades, and now the business world is waking up to the merits of free‚ creative cultures. Innovation only emulsifies when individual voices are empowered by open policies.

If 21st-century managers want to succeed, then it’s time to do away with the dress codes and time sheets that are the relics of an efficiency-driven era. It’s time to unlock the power of individuals, let people be creative, and embrace individual personalities within the mass of an organization. Innovative employees are hired as individuals‚ and they should be free to be unique. Then, they will reward the economy with the next 100 years of good ideas.

So‚ on your next business trip, when you’re standing on the jetway waiting to board, take a look at the people around you. Which person do you think is most likely to come up with the next big game-changing idea? Is it the person in the suit with the expensive roll-aboard? Or is it the 20–something wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers? If you’re overlooking the latter, you may be doing so at your own peril. And perhaps you should think about how comfortable you are in your clothes, too. The future of our economy depends on businesses tapping into creative, innovative thinking. In the years to come, that means the most important employees might be the ones wearing sneakers—if that’s what they feel like wearing. There will always be a place for rules, but rules are so 20th century.

A version of this piece appeared in the April 2010 issue of design mind magazine.

 

Author David Sherwin travels to a Buddhist monastery in Japan to understand the work of a designer and where ideas come from.

“People who think that small (dumb) things don’t matter have never slept in a room with a mosquito.” This is the mantra I’ve always used with my university students. It gets their attention, and it's a good way to look at the world we inhabit and the things we create. I don’t mean to be pedantic, but simple is just too complicated. We’ve all heard the saying “simplicity isn’t simple,” so to make things simple, I call simple “dumb.”  

First let's be clear, dumb is not "stupid" because dumb, like stem cells, binary code, or tofu, can become just about anything. The beauty of dumb is that it is generally free, accessible and transferable. Dumb is playful and innocent. Dumb is digital thinking about our analog world. Dumb is bottom-up and networked. Dumb is open-source, modular, and scalable. And when it comes to working with material stuff, dumb turns out to be really smart.

It seems that when people go to college, especially design school, they become enamored with the obtuse and the complicated (which are often mistaken for the intricate and complex). I won’t go into what typically happens to design student’s expectations after they graduate into the “real” world (yikes), and their desire to make a meaningful impact on the world we live in is not a bad thing, of course. In fact, it is at the core of our TeachDesign program. However, students often go through complicated loops to generate complicated outcomes in their quest to make this impact. But as scientists, programmers, mathematicians, engineers, and toddlers have so often modeled: You can use the simple to achieve the elegant.

Why all this dumb talk again? I’m thinking about dumb again these days because our students in our TeachDesign program at McCallum High School have stumbled onto dumb methods and dumb materials to help them achieve their project goals. They’ve done this because they are unaware of the affinity for the complicated that awaits them once they begin university. They are using dumb materials and methods because, as I mentioned, dumb is free and available.

Our good friend and TeachDesign colleague, Chris Robbins, is somewhat of a Freegan, opposing wastefulness whenever possible. His compulsion was our students’ good fortune when he showed up to our first concrete test-pour with rubber-backed carpet remnants along with two boxes made from reclaimed wood that he had salvaged from frog’s recent office renovation and move. The students were to make these into seats, and as they began to play with these remnants of carpet, I was amazed to see that they not only saw the potentials but also how to use them. They began to achieve an understanding of what those things could be and how they could transform from flat to single and double curves just by pinning down certain parts of the sheet and by letting other parts of the sheet interpolate between those points. Anyone who’s ever modeled digitally knows the importance of splines and nurbs, but to the students, they were just letting the dumb material inform the way they were working.

Similar to Louis Kahn who famously asked "Brick, what do you want to be?", the students intuitively understood that the sheet wanted to be curved or lay flat but didn’t want to make sharp corners. Within minutes they were working with beautiful and elegant double-curving surfaces. I would bet that the complex math and geometry needed to describe these forms would make most of us curl into the fetal position, and yet here were high school students finding forms that would make the likes of Chris Bangle or Yves Behar giddy.

In retrospect, what happened on the day of the first test-pour was even more amazing than it initially seemed because the work appeared to be so simple, fluid, and effortless. In dealing with the reality of abstract, negative space along with the actual implications of flexibility and surface texture that were inherent in the materials, the students understood the power of imagination merged with material knowledge. As students were beginning to use the materials’ traits to their advantage rather than using brute force or overly complicated techniques to wrangle them into position, they began to remind me more of a judoka (a judo practitioner) than a boxer. This was about learning through doing; this was project-based learning in action. In addition to the art skills gained through diagramming, sketching, and drawing and the ability to prototype, they’ll be able to apply this type of Dumb thinking to other design challenges in the future.

But for now they are blissfully and productively unaware because they are too busy doing to worry about anything else. They are busy acquiring and testing knowledge about how stuff works and doesn’t work, how things are used by real people, and how to harness the innate potential for things to change to their advantage. They are learning from failure and embracing the accidental while learning how be agile when things go wrong. They are embracing the mundane and learning how to create beautiful things. And how sometimes it’s okay to think dumb.

You can follow the TeachDesign Austin project on Twitter

Photo (cc) by Flickr user shutupyourface

design mind on GOOD is a series exploring the power of design by the editors of design mind magazine.

I won’t pretend to know a lot about Samuel Beckett or his writing, but the notion of "failing better" resonates very strongly with me. Design is all about failure. It's about taking an initial swag at something and seeing how it works. Does your design solve the problem? Does it create a delightful, intuitive experience? Not quite? Well, then tweak it. Rev it. Iterate it. The more you experiment, the more you iterate, the better.

Why is that? Well, when doing design work, you're drawing up plans. But plans are just that—mental thoughts that you project on a subject matter. In the words of the architect Louis Kahn, you're trying to create "meaningful order." Order is pretty easy: Just pick and organizing principle or a pattern and you've got order. But meaningful? That's the tricky part. What is meaningful? To whom is it meaningful? Is it universally meaningful or is it just meaningful to a particular audience?

Creating meaning is the hardest part of design; you're not going to get it right the first time. But you can iterate it. Not just once, but many times. And the sooner you're doing iterations in the actual materials of the finished product, the better the design will be. Because you can't perfectly premeditate meaningful experiences. You have to experiment and see what happens.

Our joint design project with McCallum High School is no exception. We've been working with 12 students to develop a concept called "Bubbles" which consists of a set of interactive outdoor seating arrangements. We decided to incorporate sonar proximity sensors to create playful behavior with lights when people approach and move away from the bubbles. Our first thought was to make the lights get brighter as people approach, and dimmer as they move away, and we thought it would be a good idea to properly diffuse the LED lights so that there were no bright spots—just one smooth, seamless gradient of color growing brighter and dimmer.

So, one of our brilliant technologists from frog hooked up the sonar sensor, a Phidgets board (an open hardware platform), and the LEDs and then wrote an Adobe AIR app that took in the proximity readings and controlled the LEDs accordingly. And then something unpredictable happened. But that seamless gradient of color? Not so much. Instead, the lights seemed to be going off almost randomly. They did follow some sort of pattern (as you got closer, more of them turned on) and you could definitely see the "spots" where the LEDs were, so we covered the LEDs with crumpled paper. The result looked like a lightning storm! It was so cool!

So was that failure? It was definitely a small failure in the sense that result was not what we had designed on paper. But somehow, the "failed" behavior was meaningful. It mapped to our collective memories of lightning storms and it resonated with us.

That experience reminded us that we shouldn't spend too much time premeditating designs. Instead, we should experiment, play, get our hands on real materials and see what they tell us. What do concrete, wood, and LEDs have to say? What do they, as materials and agents, lend themselves to? Maybe they'll tell us something we didn't expect.

So, we're actually going to start failing more often now. We're going to divide up into two teams and experiment with our materials. Each team will have different ideas. And each team will probably experience lots of little failures; but that's how we'll learn. And that's how we'll create a more meaningful design.

Teach design by experimentation. Don't be afraid of failure.

design mind on GOOD is a series exploring the power of design by the editors of design mind magazine. New posts every week.

“A revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new tools, it happens when society adopts new behaviors” –Clay Shirky

It was my third day at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi), and, predictably, many conversations in both the panel discussions and in line at the taco trucks outside were trying to address social media. But the focus of the conversation seemed to shift away from the often superficial predictions of what the next platform would be and how it would be monetized. Instead, it seemed a thoughtful maturation was taking place: We were asked to consider our influence in these social-media spaces, how much control we had over our identities, and if we could make space for underrepresented groups to be recognized and protected.

As I’ve mentioned before, it is up to online communities to disrupt the oppressive status quo at conventional institutions. The same applies to our conception of currency, and how we form online “transactions.” Now that the focus among the technorati is shifting from how to monetize social media toward how to use it to create social impact, we have an opportunity to harness the meaning economy (“Me-conomy,” as Markus Albers puts it) by ushering in a new culture of social engagement. These transactions can take on the form of a barter system in which people swap their knowledge, resources, and content in exchange for civil rights, and a platform for their voice, be it communal or individual.

And so, early on a hazy Sunday morning on day 3 of SXSWi, Clay Shirky, the author of Here Comes Everybody, gave a presentation called “Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature, and Digital Data.” The title was provocative and humorous enough, but it was Shirky’s ability to address the underlying human motives that drive our behavior and action for greater social change that stirred me. One comment Shirky made really resonated: “Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does.” And then he went on to underscore the power of content sharing—the kind, says Shirky, “where people are trying to create civic value to change the culture the participants are embedded in.” His message was no less than the fact that the free and frequent exchange of information has the ability to catalyze revolution.

Shirky notes several examples of groups trying to come up with a public solution to a societal problem by freely distributing content, only to draw the ire of established institutions. One was the case of PickupPal, a ride-sharing service in Ottawa that was providing information for commuters to more easily use the service. It became so easy to use that the City of Ottawa, whose public transportation system was at risk of loosing market share, passed a law making carpooling and ridesharing unreasonably difficult to do. PickupPal was deemed “too efficient.” A local movement to save the rideshare company began and the uproar in the community caused the city to rewrite the law.

Shirky called this type of distribution “jackhammer sharing,” which he called powerful enough to destroy the existing environment or even promote human rights.

Take, for example, the story of the Indian radical group Sri Ram Sena. Although their attacks on women's freedom were known in the community, the government was not stepping in to protect its citizens and Sri Ram Sena continued to threaten women. It wasn’t until Nisha Susan, an Indian journalist, began a Facebook group last January that organized a call to action, including sending pink panties to the leaders of the group in mockery, and mobilizing women to go out to bars in spite of the threats.  "Once it was clear women were acting as a group, then the state acted,” Shirky said. “They arrested members of Sri Ram Sena, and there have been no more attacks, We would like the state to do the right thing on behalf of citizens, but they don't always for individuals. They do for organized groups."

Will this movement to barter our knowledge, our experiences, and potentially our identities succeed in creating a shift for our collective empowerment? Many online communities are working to radically restructure how information is shared, and they’re motivated not only by an expectation for transparency, but by a growing sense of influence. By making ideas easily accessible via uploading, sharing, and providing space for collaboration, movements and the ideologies behind them can spread exponentially.

Photo of Clay Shirky on a bus (CC) by Flickr user Joi
 

design mind on GOOD is a series exploring the power of design by the editors of design mind magazine.

Part 1 of this letter was published last week. Here is part 2 and the second 10 things you ought to pay attention to as you build your design career.

1. Never stop learning

While I use most of my projects as learning vehicles, I find that this isn’t enough.  You should never stop learning. What would you learn and how would your view change if you went to 1,000 meet ups? As designers, our minds need to be as flexible as possible. Learning something new helps us see more and more possibilities and make connections that previously weren’t there.

2. Be naïve (and believe in two-headed cows)

I was voted most naïve in highschool; as a designer, that means I believe anything is possible. That ability to suspend our disbelief is key to innovation and design. I remember a co-creation session with teenagers and their ideal group game. Somehow the topic of Charlie and The Chocolate Factory came up and the idea of lickable walls. Rather than discard that idea as ridiculous, the alternative is to use it is a catalyst for design possibilities. We use this type of thinking in our frogTHINK ideation as provocation. What do you believe is definitive and what would you gain from pretending it wasn’t? The only limits are in our minds.

3. Develop a personal brand

You may think this goes without saying, but I’m not talking about merely having a blog. Instead, you need to really understand who you are and what you bring as a designer. My favorite example of this is from an interview candidate we’ll call TC. TC knew what her abilities were, her best strengths, and her ideal roles not simply from knowing herself, but by asking 55 people the following questions, “What three adjectives would you use to describe me?” “Which of my skills provide the most value to an employer?” and “Finish this statement, ”TC, you should be…” The results were included in the back of her portfolio. Knowing yourself from others’ viewpoints will help you clarify your direction and help sell yourself to prospective employees.

4. Trust yourself

Know you are good enough now. If you don’t trust yourself, no one else will. This doesn’t mean be a prima donna, but it does mean that your opinions matter and your viewpoints are extremely valuable. Your design process, your design thinking and the embodiment of that (the end product) is your voice. Use it. I am most impressed by junior designers who reach out and ask for my input or opinion because just the act of reaching out speaks volumes—it is risky. Remember, if you don’t reach your hand out, there will never be anyone to grab it.

5. Get incredibly comfortable speaking

Join Toastmasters if you must (one of our creative directors did). Designers must constantly be able to promote their ideas—whether on an internal team, to a client, or on the podium. When I run through a presentation, I generally visualize the entire presentation in my mind. You need to get incredibly comfortable with the articulation of, the presentation of and the defense of ideas. I would also recommend improv training because nothing ever goes as expected.

6. Learn the art of wabi sabi

The art of “wabi sabi” is knowing there is beauty in the imperfect. We learn through trial and error, through mistakes. There is no such thing as “perfect” in design. There are different viewpoints, more than one solution and opportunities everywhere. Let go of the word “perfect” and focus on what really matters – designing for people the best that you can and the ability to be easy on yourself. There are no SATs for design (or the presidency, for that matter). If there were, every answer would be “D., All of the Above.”

7. Know the designer’s paradox: Hurry up and think

Every year, I see the design cycle shrinking. As a discipline (of design) we have reached the inner limits of our creative gestation – in other words, the minimum time it takes to innovate. Creativity = Area of Focus (Existing Knowledge + New Discovery) * Time. The time in this equation is used to think. We are often expected to do more with less time. While you may have had the luxury of time in school and occasionally in the design industry, get ready for a much faster paced process. And to keep the insanity at bay, read Carl Honore’s In Praise of Slowness.

8. Grok the idea of “sfumato”

Designers deal with lots of ambiguity. Not only in the actual process, but in allowing an answer to develop. Phrases like “creative juices” and “ideas percolating” describe the internalization we do to bring order and clarity to the chaos. When designing “the future of…” anything, you (and your team) need to be able to design comfortably in ambiguity—you may not have THE idea immediately or have a clear path or process to get there. The very act of design is the process of discovery. Allow yourself the time to discover. And yes, I realize this seems hypocritical to #17.

9. Try to find the most unusual or obscure angle. We call these outliers.

My path was set the day I received the “Anti-Coloring Book” for my fifth birthday. I started to really enjoy extremes and took creative risks in school. I’ve translated this into design, for example, by developing ideas for the WTC memorial through analyzing hundreds of photographs and the artifacts they contained. This obscure approach led to the idea of the largest blood bank in the world located at the WTC site. In research, we specifically look to outliers for unique thinking and things not considered. Here you’ll find your inspiration. Here you’ll find design.

10. Train Your Brain (to think like a designer)

In the last five years the concept of neuroplasticity (a malleable brain) has taken the medical field by storm. Experiments have revealed that playing the piano and imagining playing the piano have the same neurological effect. Additionally, rats in an “enriched environment” (toys and exercise wheels) have a substantially enlarged brain and more neural connections. We should strive to play the imagined piano, we should strive to be in an enriched environment. Buy Crayola’s 3D glasses (with chalk) and play.

P.S. One final, but important note: We are all designers. Without taking anything away from the design industry, we need more people in all industries to recognize the impact that comes from their “designs”—whether it’s a doctor’s diagnosis or a teacher’s curriculum or a government employee—every human is a designer. As a discipline, we are trained to creatively solve challenges, to consider the future implications, to consider those other than ourselves. Our world is by design and we need more designers than ever before to handle the evolving world. I ask one thing of you in closing—teach one child design thinking or empower an adult by telling them they are a designer. We can all make a difference.

design mind on GOOD is a series exploring the power of design by the editors of design mind magazine.

For two days in February my time was filled with inspiring talks about design, technology, and so-named “cool shit” at the FITC conference in Amsterdam. Since I returned to Austin, however, I have been looking to find a common thread that tied the talks together into some sort of larger idea. After thinking through a number of possibilities I realized one thing: All the presenters were out of their minds—in a good way.

These were extremely passionate and motivated individuals, but more than that they were obsessed. Perhaps as designers we all have to be a bit obsessive-compulsive about art, nature, storytelling, data, programming, craft, or whatever. If we aren’t, we would have nothing to inspire us; nothing would enable us to transcend the everyday. There would be no guiding force in our work. We would just stand still.

Some designers go for walks to literally avoid standing still. Jared Tarbell, an experimental digital artist and co-founder of Etsy, hits the trail to find lichens, rocks, and patterns in nature that inspire him to create an impressive array of programmatic studies, which he posts at his site. Many of his experiments are informed by mathematical patterns known as recursion or the Fibonacci sequence, which explains the patterns often found in snail shells and sunflower heads. Tarbell obsessively and wholeheartedly employs nature to digitally create complex designs and then applies them to paper, wood, and even stone.

Persistence is also key. Shaun Hamontree of MK12, a motion firm based in Kansas City, is an avid storyteller and is in no doubt inspired by the very stories he is commissioned to portray. His firm was up for consideration by a production company to do visual effects for the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace. In order to get the bid, they almost maniacally made the decision to proceed as though they had already been awarded the work. Using tactics that would have made 007 proud— like obtaining a script and blueprints for the set through espionage—they won the job.

Fortunately, that isn’t the end of the story. Although they hadn’t been invited to design the opening credits, to stay ahead of the game, they did them anyway. They submitted their take on the credits to the production company, but were told it didn’t fit the style of the film. Not to be defeated that easily, they took the “fake it until you make it” mantra to a whole new level: They said there was actually a second version but it would take a couple days to hone and deliver. So, they went back and frantically created a new version that won them the opening credits.

But inspiration and persistence can only be successful with motivation. Edison once defined genius as “one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” One speaker that seems to embody this principle is Erik Natzke, a Flash guru who uses technology to create innovative work. He attributes his success to the willingness to fail and the stubbornness not to give up. Where most people might use a plug-in or take the easy route he learns how to build his own plug-in and then uses that. Although time consuming, this hones his skill so that he can constantly redefine the type of work that he does. Producing work at this level takes a lot of perseverance and doggedness, but most of all it takes having the right approach to solving problems.

To be truly inspired you must first be obsessed, persistent, and motivated. It doesn’t hurt to bend the truth every once and a while either.

Photo (CC) by Flickr user Justmakeit

“Autonomy and freedom of choice are critical to our well being, and choice is critical to freedom and autonomy. Nonetheless, though modern Americans have more choice than any group of people ever has before, and thus, presumably, more freedom and autonomy, we don't seem to be benefiting from it psychologically.”  —Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice

design mind on GOOD is a series exploring the power of design by the editors of design mind magazine.

Consumer choices can be paralyzing. At least that’s what Barry Schwartz suggests in his book The Paradox of Choice, in which he writes that modern manufacturing has created a system with too many choices and too much burden on the consumer. Indeed, deciding what to eat may be one of the most stressful things we do each week on our visit to the grocery store. In my previous posts, I suggested we can think and act like designers—that we can, in fact, take design action, even when it comes to practical everyday things. In this post, I’ve decided to show you how it’s done by grocery shopping and making a meal using the same four-step design process I use when working with Fortune 500 companies like GE or HP.

Step 1: Orient—Understand and map rituals and habits and identify the opportunities for change.




For designers, the orientation step is important because it allows us to understand the project or problem in relation to new and strange surroundings. The hope is that by taking a closer look, we find a new layer of meaning that had previously had escaped our perceptions. For the grocery-list-making endeavor, I decided to take a close look at my family’s food rituals, and I found several nuances.

We buy most of our groceries through an online ordering service, and while ordering online has benefits (namely not having to lug heavy grocery bags down the street and up the stairs), we still have to decide what to buy. The Web site we order from has a feature that allows us to fill our cart with all the items we ordered from the previous week, which is great for basics like bread, water, juice, etc., but it does nothing to inspire new explorations or recipes. When creating a grocery list for the week you are, in fact, trying to guess how you're going to feel all week—literally what food you’re in the mood for—and for the most part it's no fun. I wanted to change that. I wanted to translate this experience into what I call an "inspiration map" so that my wife, kids, and I would fire up the same fun, anticipatory parts of our brains as when we get when ordering dinner from a restaurant.

Challenge: Make the creation of a grocery list an easier and more pleasurable moment in the week.

Opportunity: Create a visual tool (a map) that can inspire food choices for the week.

Step 2. Plan—Decide what the map should look like and learn how to integrate it into a daily routine.

After identifying an opportunity for change, we can plan how to make this inspiration map come to life in a prototype. The restaurant-menu ordering experience is what I wanted to use as a design analogy. The goal was to inspire me and the family while making a grocery list.

The name of the prototype concept I came up with was “Food Moods—An Inspiration Map for Shopping and Cooking.” It is, in essence, a mock-menu that lives in the drawer where we keep our delivery menus. We can pull it out any time we decide to shop for food or make a meal.

Now that I had a concept, I had to make it real. Designers do this by defining a list of requirements around a concept. I decided to use the menus in my drawer to inspire what the shape of the Food Moods menu would be, and how the information would be presented. For the map to be inspiring it had to excite the hunger part of the brain, which meant we needed good images to make the food look fun and delicious.

Here are the requirements I came up with for the Food Moods menu:
•    It needed to fold into a “to-go” menu size for easy access and storage.
•    It had to adopt qualities of our favorite menus (the ones with more pictures).
•    The images needed to be in two categories: general flavors and textures (like the color swatches you might use when choosing a paint color for your house); and images of prepared meals (which needed to make the food look appealing but also simple so we could guess the ingredients and cooking techniques).
•    It ought to be double-sided: one side for meal inspiration, and one side for inspiration around flavors and textures.
•    Finally, I wanted to create multiple copies for the kids to play with so they feel like part of the process. Whenever we order food our kids emulate our behaviors by looking at their own menus and making their own mock phone calls to the restaurant (which, incidentally, has helped them learn our address).



Step 3. Create—Make the map.

I created a two-sided menu using all the requirements. On the back side I grouped meal images based on meal type and or primary ingredient. In the top right I put sandwiches; the bottom row were reserved for side dishes. I later realized that the grouping could actually be arranged by breakfast, lunch, dinner, so I changed the design. Since the kids have pretty basic rituals for breakfast (cereal), most of the images I chose were about inspiring lunches and dinners. I also discovered that the flavors and texture swatches might work better as a wheel where the connection points have more meaning, such as sweet and sour. This is a first draft prototype and this is exactly the type of feedback and iterations it should inspire.



Step 4. Act—Implement the plan.

After designing the map and creating the physical artifact I put a copy in the kitchen. Now when we plan our menus for the week we get the map out to help us plan. So far it’s an effective planning system for my wife and I, and it has become a valuable tool for grocery shopping that eases a key moment of frustration in our journey as consumers. I’ll do a follow-up in a few months to let you know how the map has worked out and how it changed, as it most surely will. Indeed, a true designer never stops trying to change things.

design mind

At every home, we started with a sit-down interview to ask the participants about their behaviors. After that, we had them show us the food in their kitchen. They displayed the insides of their cabinets, refrigerators, freezers, and pantries. Finally, we asked them to cook a simple meal of their choosing, after which we’d all sit down to eat together.

The part I found most interesting was how participants’ attitudes shifted when they switched from telling us about their behavior to showing us what actually went on in their kitchens. Time after time, no matter how healthy or clean or “good” a person said they were about cooking and eating, as soon as any of them were forced to show us what was in their pantries, they became self-effacing, guilty, and embarrassed. There were no exceptions. Everyone understood that they should be eating well, cooking nutritious meals, and being healthy, but they all felt like they were failing, regardless of the truth.

The research revealed to us an incredible pattern of guilt and aspiration in how people eat—an embedded cycle of should/don’t/want. Our research subjects believed there existed an ideal they had to live up to, but none of them thought they could meet that standard, so they felt guilty. And yet they continued to aspire to that goal.

I’ve since noticed that pattern in many other programs I’ve been a part of, and not just ones dealing with food. I think it says a lot about consumer culture: the culture of empowerment and being the best you can be, and the ubiquity of material objects—those things that are always available to buy and own, things that represent you, and your worth in the world.

Denise Gershbein is a creative director in frog’s San Francisco studio.

A version of this piece appeared in the May 2009 issue of design mind magazine.