The one thing that jumped out at me was report of Keith Yamashita’s talk:

KEITH YAMASHITA /// Chairman, SYPartners

Keith Yamashita is one of the masterminds behind SYPartners, a creative firm that has helped brands from Apple to IBM to Starbucks define their futures and reinvent themselves. Drawing on decades of experience with creative teams, Yamashita outlined a handful of the habits that lead to incredible collaborative performances.

• Creative greatness is the result of an ensemble. We often think of creativity as happening in isolation, but this is rarely the case.  Navigating your dual role as a soloist and a member of the ensemble will help drive your dream to its full potential.
• Find your unique superpower. When teams are at their best, every person serves a unique and essential role that plays to their individual strengths. SYPartners developed a deck of “superpower cards” to help attendees identify their superpower, which could be anything from Grit to Peace-Making to Energy.
• Create an environment where people can be their best selves. Respect what each teammate’s “superpower” is, and give them every chance to use it by calling on them in specific situations that demand their expertise. “Great teams don’t come about through chance – they cultivate a set of positive habits that lead to greatness.”

After reading this piece if you are interested in how to get some studio spirit & design criticism into your organization's culture please contact me and let's fins out how I might be able to help mentor, train, and build your team and design culture.]

Do you know what a studio is? What do you think of when you think of a studio?

a) A small apartment without any bedrooms?
b) An artist’s loft in SOHO?
c) An artisan’s studio of masters, apprentices and students?
d) A design agency’s offices in SOMA?
e) A recording studio in Hollywood?
f) A movie studio in Burbank?
g) All of the above?
h) None of the above?

That’s ok, obviously I thought of all those too. The one that interests me as a designer is not the design agency but rather the artisan studio after which the design agency is so closely evolved from. While there are few if any artisan studios any more, there are many design studios around the world. They exist in design agencies, but they also exist (in a few) large corporations like Apple, Trek, Motorola, Samsung, BMW (DesignWorks), etc. And most certainly they exist in a host of institutions dedicated to design education.

Why did designers take on the model of the artisan studio? Well, to first answer that question we first need to dissect the artisan studio itself into some core elements.

First, the artisan studio was as much about teaching as it was about production. Teaching wasn’t limited to skills nor even thinking processes, but the artisan studio was responsible for teaching design language, principles and frameworks. These more subtle aspects of design education were learned experientially and not through study or practice like craft and knowledge are learned. They were molded into students through conditioning by criticism.

When students experience criticism in a design studio they are being exposed to the thinking of the master of that studio. That thinking is an implicit manifesto that can never be articulated effectively or clearly in a direct matter, because to do so actually would cause a false confidence in a student that they actually understand it with experiencing it for themselves.

Second, the artisan studio was a space that exploded with creativity. This wasn’t necessarily about individual creativity, but rather, the creativity of the studio as a whole. It is this area on which I wish to elaborate.

Design studios regardless of history or type succeed due to that deep connection to the whimsy of the artist. I don’t mean whimsy as “flight of fancy”, but rather as an openness to influence and inspiration from any source, especially the unexpected ones. Who better to be influenced and inspired by than the people you work with and everything about their work and lives?

What makes this easier is the creation of that shared language and collection of principles mentioned previously. This together with one major quality of every successful design studio allows for the greatest number of associations through collisions of people and ideas. That major quality though is openness. The open space is not just an aesthetic but serves an intentional function, whereby everyone in the studio regardless of experience level, has transparency into the total of the studio.

This transparency though is not just about architecture. The studio also contains social mores that allow the transparency to be taken advantage of without abusing people or reducing productivity. Again, part of this goes back to that previously mentioned “criticism”, but is also about what is taught that isn’t said. The studio is a space for young to older adults, where the young (or recent) arrivals to the studio are expected to follow the mores (never spoken). This is akin to the slow and arduous process of a kindergarten-aged child finally figuring out the rules of conversation–as in when to interrupt, interject, or otherwise know your turn to speak.

A recruiter from Apple once told me that at Apple’s Industrial Design studio their junior designers don’t directly contribute to the product design lifecycle for their first year. They are there to observe, listen, and learn. They are students in that classical artisan way. It has nothing to do with skills or creativity. They prove that before getting picked to enter the studio. It is about learning the specific language, frameworks and principles of the Apple Studio.

Few design studios take it this far today. Their lower margins don’t allow for this level of intense apprenticeship. But even if being incorporated directly into the product lifecycle in a studio, a junior designer today will be mentored and schooled.

One of the core ways that a studio’s culture is maintained is through its open communication and open space. Designers have an enlarged peripheral vision due to the open space. But this has a larger affect than pure visibility. It creates a sensibility, or ethos in that space, that there are no boundaries, walls, or doors for what each designer is allowed to both see and contribute to. Anyone can interject into anyone else’s business, and further these interruptions are not just expected, but rather, they are encouraged.

It’s one thing to request criticism or to have set points for review. It is quite another to encourage contribution any time the spirit rises. But there is an implicit understanding that “contribution” besides not requiring invitation, also doesn’t require specific form or venue. Every conversation can lead to contribution and often that contribution may not ever be traceable.

In the end, the goal of the studio environment is to increase collisions of people and thus their thoughts. These collisions of thoughts lead to associations, when externalized (usually visually) lead to more and more collisions & associations. They then evolve from thoughts to ideas, and then ideas to concepts, and finally, from concepts to executed designs.

This is the serendipity that creativity thrives on, and while they are indeed accidents, the studio is intentional and purposeful in its readiness to recognize, curate, evaluate, refine and harness these accidents–Serendipity by Design.

The biggest piece is that I will no longer be a full time professor at SCAD. I love teaching; I so appreciate my students’ passion, energy, and talent; and, I’ve enjoyed working alongside fabulous peers with such tremendous knowledge and dedication. I have learned and discovered so much about design, teaching, education life and a host of other things.

So why leave? And why now?

Being a professor is a commitment. Schools need to understand their staffing requirements well in advance of the term, and they need to feel confident that that staffing will remain in place throughout the entirety of the term. This up coming term, I didn’t feel I could make that commitment.

Why? What’s going on?

Well, I decided to go all in (probably a few months earlier than I would have liked) and work on a startup that myself & my partner in crime, Brooks Eqsterling (@brooksre), are incredibly excited about.

What is this mystery startup?

Peer Loft as we call it is in very early stages, aka stealth. What I will say is that we are a designer-led company focused on filling the gap other collaboration tools have made by designing solutions that fill the needs & real-world practice of designers.

Also, to make money during this time of flux, I will be doing consulting. I am interested In helping organizations build, train, and make effective their digital design teams. My first deployment will actually be w/ A former employer in a different department.

I will be looking for new opportunities in the coming months, so if you have contacts & or needs please do let me know.

On a related note to Peer Loft, we are looking for a co-founder of the technical variety who has a strong interest in: SaaS, Mac desktop, iPad, and API engineering and tech team management.

Of course we are also looking for general tech talent and financing by people who are interested in a design, collaboration, and design thinking.

Well, that’s me and my world. See you out there.

I hope it will help you in your times of creative need:

The graphic designer who has played the most dramatic role in the rise of Occupy Wall Street, isn’t Shepard Fairey or Jake Levitas. On September 24, 2011, a group of peaceful protesters in Manhattan were pepper sprayed by police officers. The incident was captured on video and posted to YouTube, where it has been viewed over 1.5 million times. “When the pepper-spray video came out, that was the hook,” said an activist in the Vanity Fair oral history. “That’s what made people focus on Occupy Wall Street.” The central figure in the video is a woman named Chelsea Elliott, a graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design, and a graphic designer.

Sometimes, the key to political change isn’t designing a logo or poster. It’s simply having the courage to show up and make your voice heard, no matter what the cause —and no matter what the risk.

It’s true regardless who the person was, but the fact that she was from SCAD gave me (as a SCAD professor) huge hope.

SCAD for many reasons lacks the intense political fervor that I grew up with at Cal Berkeley. And I’ve missed it. Programs like Design Ethos’ “Doference” are amazing events but lack the strident angst that I expect and want from a university setting.

I’m so glad that Chelsea Elliot for a single moment found her courage (the hardest part) and thus her voice (even if serendipitous in its outcome) and acted.

What are you going to do?

My last truly political act (besides simply voting & typing) was walking streets in Philadelphia for now President Barack Obama. Seeing Pennsylvania go Blue in 2008 was an amazing end to my 30s and a general highlight of my life. I ran into the streets of Ft. Greene Brooklyn later that night with hundreds if not thousands of of immediate friends amazed at what we believed to be the biggest national grassroots campaign of our age.

What are you going to do? Why are you waiting? What’s your issue?

Be it!

Scream it!

Do it!

– Engage!

Here’s the embed (Enjoy!):

The link on the IxDA site.

Last year I had the honor of being able to do 2 of the 3 wk program. I wanted to do all 3 but they wouldn’t let me. I cam to the program early and got a tast of the first week and so wish I went to that week as well. You can read about my experience in a post from last year.

I feel really strongly about these opportunities. There will be others: SVA and CMU I’m sure will repeat their summer programs and maybe there will be new opportunities. But as a USer and as an interaction designer who believes in a very broad practice that is way beyond the web, mobile and desktop projects that the far majority of us usually work on, going to CIID in particular should be on your list of experiences. I wish it was 4 wks instead of 3 wks so I didn’t have to choose between the 2nd week parallel sessions: Computational Design (dive in Processing) and Physical Prototyping.

But like I said, it was important for me as a USer to get the heck out of the US. Learning in a new country over a sustained period where you have to cook, clean, and live in a foreign country to me should be prescribed as part of every designer’s education. If you haven’t had this experience at some point in your life, you should take it for sure. And if you can do it AND learn from the amazing faculty at CIID, then even better.

So what are you waiting for. APPLY NOW!

Note to Alie: How in the world did I not get into a single picture for the site?

True or false: “Being able to take abstract direction is a key to being a great designer.”

Or is it just interaction and service designers that need this? My gut says all designers need it, if not in the past than definitely in the present.

But what I’m also noticing is that the bulk of the students I teach have issues with taking abstract direction. What does this mean? It means that the directions being given for a task are incomplete or have a ton of room for interpretation. In fact, a great designer would probably revel in the fact of having room for interpretation, no?

A couple of my peers and I have had a discussion and the only interpretation is some mix of the following:

• (my favorite) We have killed the spirit of risk and the excitement of creativity by raising a generation of children to be educated to the “test” and nothing more.
• Disciplines like interaction design and service design that are abstract by their very nature require a higher level of maturity than other design disciplines that are fine “just taking orders” in their junior praxis.

Most likely it is some combination of the two, but what are your thoughts?