Brain candy!.. This was originally done for the graphic arts
community. I think we can apply it to ourselves as well. Hope you
all enjoy it. Jerry NYC
An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth by Bruce Mau
-
Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow.
Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce
it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to
experience events and the willingness to be changed by them. -
Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all
agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration
of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long
as you stick to good you’ll never have real growth. -
Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives
the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If
process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we
will know we want to be there. -
Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the
engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as
beautiful experiment s, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors.
Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day. -
Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover
something of value. -
Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search
of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the
process. Ask different questions. -
Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of
production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit. -
Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies.
Lack judgment. Postpone criticism. -
Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to
begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere. -
Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it
to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead. -
Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid,
generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other
hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to
applications. -
Keep moving. The market and its operations have a tendency to
reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part
of your practice. -
Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and
surprising opportunities may present themselves. -
Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free
yourself from limits of this sort. -
Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence.
Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout
your life at the rate of an infant. -
Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled
with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast
creative potential. -
. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas
you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others. -
Stay up late. Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far,
been up too long, worked too hard, and you’re separated from the
rest of the world. -
Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for
something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for. -
Be careful to take risks. Time is genetic. Today is the child of
yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today
will create your future. -
Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like
it, do it again. -
Make your own tools. Hybridize your tools in order to build
unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield
entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our
capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference. -
Stand on someone’s shoulders. You can travel farther carried on
the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so
much better. -
Avoid software. The problem with software is that everyone has
it. -
Don’t clean your desk. You might find something in the morning
that you can’t see tonight. -
Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. It’s not good for
you. -
Read only left-hand pages. Marshall McLuhan did this. By
decreasing the amount of we leave room for what he
called our “noodle.” -
Make new words. Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a
new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression.
The expression generates new conditions. -
Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not
device-depen dent. -
Organization 3D Liberty. Real innovation in design, or any other
field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of
cooperative ly managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only
able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget.
The myth of a split between “creatives” and “suits” is what Leonard
Cohen calls a ‘charming artifact of the past.’ -
Don’t borrow money. Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By
maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s
not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to
maintain this discipline, and how many have failed. -
Listen carefully. Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings
with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could
ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety
of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our
own. Neither party will ever be the same. -
Take field trips. The bandwidth of the world is greater than
that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive,
interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time,
computer graphic-simulate d environment. -
Make mistakes faster. This isn’t my idea - I borrowed it. I
think it belongs to Andy Grove. -
Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can.
You’ll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly
remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version
of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and
underused imitation is as a technique. -
Scat. When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up
something else 85 but not words. -
Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.
-
Explore the other edge. Great liberty exists when we avoid
trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading
edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment
made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential. -
Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens
outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces - what
Dr. Seuss calls “the waiting place.” Hans Ulrich Obrist once
organized a science and art conference with all of the
infrastructure of a conference - the parties, chats, lunches,
airport arrivals - but with no actual conference. Apparently it was
hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations. -
Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and
regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative
life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are
manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the
fences and cross the fields. -
Laugh. People visiting the studio often comment on how much we
laugh. Since I’ve become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of
how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.aue things. Even simple
tools that are -
Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history.
Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a
direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded
or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes
us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that
every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source,
and, as such, a potential for growth itself. -
Power to the people. Play can only happen when people feel they
have control over their lives. We can’t be free agents if we’re not free.