Creativity Central [Marty Baker]

Since the publication of The Laws of  Simplicity, John Maeda has become the patron saint of the art balancing simplicity and complexity. 

A former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Maeda taught media arts and sciences there for 12 years and served as Associate Director of Research at the MIT Media Lab. Today, he is the president of the Rhode Island School of Design, a place world renown for nurturing artists and designers of all stripes.

At BIF5, he was interviewed by co-host Bruce Nussbaum, Professor of Innovation and Design at the Parson’s School For Design. Considering their mutual interests, it was an interesting pas de deux.

The interview was an odd mélange of non sequiturs that got the audience laughing when host Saul Kaplan said, “I hope someone will provide a good translation of what just happened.”

But it’s all part of the art of BIF. Ironically, it made many in the audience want to discover more about both Maeda and Nussbaum.  Each has made an impact on how "innovation" and "design" are framed in current discussions in both the classroom and in corporate America.

If Maeda could design a new curriculum for innovators, he would start with a pencil, paper and sketchpad. These supplies would not be for taking notes or brainstorming ideas. Rather, Maeda would use art as a way to open the mind, stimulate creativity and cultivate truly radical ideas.

“If you think of design as a way of making ideas, I think art is the idea itself. Art thinking is everything that design thinking isn’t,” he says. “If you think of an image, you have the image and then you have everything that sits in the white space. Art is the part that isn’t defined yet and I find that perspective quite exciting.

“So many organizations and companies are downtrodden in this economy -- they are dead inside -- because they have lost the ability to imagine. They need something more vibrant, more emotional, and more connected to being human. When asked to distill down to the basic principles of art thinking, Maeda thinks it starts with reacquainting ourselves with an “almost child-like fascination with the world.”

In many ways, it echoes the core of Matthew Crawford’s excellent book, Shop Class as SoulCraft.  Crawford’s book is about the loss of manual competence and Maeda’s is about disconnecting temporarily from the digital world and reconnecting with “thinking” and expressing ideas in the simplified realm of pencil, paper and thought.

In the past year, Bruce Nussbaum took on a new career --  Professor of Innovation and Design at The New School at the Parsons School For Design.

As BIF’s Christine Flanagan writes, “Nussbaum recently launched the university’s core lecture series “Life in Beta” to show students how design tools, methodologies and approaches can move us forward in today’s environment. His class focuses on the demographic, technological, cultural, economic and political changes that are disrupting our social organizations and personal lives.

“I really want to push students to think widely about the forces shaping their lives,” explains Nussbaum. “Gen Y is perhaps the most dynamic cohort and it’s critically important they learn to harness the tools and methods of 21st century design.”
 

Nussbaum believes that design holds the key to change because of its ability to redesign large-scale social systems: “Design gives people the ability to be one with the consumer culture–to be anthropologists and sociologists and deeply understand the myriad cultures around them. It has a set of tools and methods that can guide us towards a much better way of doing things.”