The Information Age has mutated. Focus is a serious challenge. Creative focus, in a design field with
multiple masters, technical challenges, environmental concerns, a construction
industry that still builds as if its 1940, and political land mines at every
turn is tough yes. But add to
that, multiple avenues of information access, vying for our attention like jumping
Donkey in the movie Shrek…
“Pick
me! Pick me! Pick me!”
Was design always this complex? Was creative
focus always this elusive? I don’t think so.
The holidays were consumed with mulling over the increasingly
complex conditions we design within and how we might organize our design teams
to effectively respond. How might
we work together to avoid the kind of complexity that today leads to
complications and confusion? I returned to the office and waiting on my desk was "Change
By Design" by Tim Brown. And
inside I found his answer. (Thank you Doug Thornley for your generosity!)
As Brown tells us creative effort is challenging in
and of itself,
“…unlike
more analytical methods, design thinking taps into intuition as well as
rational thought. You can’t put your process into boxes and check everything
off, and that is one of the challenges of any creative methodology.”
But also, in the past, some people tried to define
design methods as purely creative — as if just “getting out of the box” were
enough — that’s what we did when we fine tuned the charette process. It was our way of making lightening
strike. (See previous post)
Brown goes into depth in making sure we understand
the subtleties in managing the creative process. He confirms that design thinking still occurs in groups, and
that large teams are still typically employed to tackle large and/or complex projects.
So here’s the difference. Large teams, when present, usually don’t arrive
to the project at the outset of the project but at the beginning of the
implementation phase. The
inspiration phase, as he calls it, by contrast requires a small, focused group
whose job is to establish the overall framework of the project. In our words, the parti.
His example of the film industry was a the most
fascinating parallel in the book.
The “preproduction phase” of almost all major films consists of, say, a
director, writer, producer and production designer. That’s it. They
develop the basic concept. As
Brown indicates, “Only later do the ‘armies’ arrive.” During the pre-production phase, this small, focused team acts
not solely as “artist-creators.”
They find not only the “idea” but also drill down to begin outlining the
key implementation strategies, schedule, locations, props, etc.
And interestingly, near the end of the
pre-production phase, there is a “read-through” of the script that includes the
whole cast, heads of departments, financiers, producers, publicists, and of
course the director. This, in the
architectural world, would be the internal “kick-off” meeting except, in
Brown’s film analogy, much inspiration and preparation has preceded it.
Looking at other creative fields I found that the
music industry handles the creation phase of projects very similarly. Their pre-production phase is when the
recording artist spends time creating and refining musical ideas and then produces
a “demo” to evaluate if those ideas have legs. This reduces time and money wasted on large production teams
and expensive studios. The goal
being to enter into the recording phase with the most promising ideas already
established. Much like the film
industry Brown tells us about.
Maybe we should create a pre-production phase in
architecture; one that combines the goal of serious idea generation with the
typical pre-design tasks already established by the AIA and then add the
implementation planning that these other creative industries use. Given the complexity we are finding in
the field of architecture, it’s worth a try.
And Brown warns us. Do not to give into the temptation of thinking that complex
problems, or projects, require more brains to solve. Expanding the pre-production team more often than not “leads
to a dramatic reduction in speed and efficiency as communications within the
team begin to take up more time than the creative process itself.” (Have you ever experienced this?) Beware; he tells us, this is when you
know your process is in trouble.
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