The Future of Innovation- Tim Brown

I can’t remember how I came across Tim Brown from IDEO, probably from one of his great talks.

Here’s one on the future of innovation at Acumen. It was really helpful when I started looking at how design and enterprise could help people.

Some nuggets

• Use information to connect
• Solve for the system- look at the context, design not just the product also business models
• Trust builds market- Holistic design is not just about design but also about accountability
• Brands bring trust
• Set up kiosks and do experiments for a day- test viability
• No idea will scale unless it solves real needs for real people

Creative Industries Federation panel notes

Great panel from across the creative sector in Scotland.

Absolutely loved Janice Kirpatrick from Graven. She hit the nail right on the head with her discourse on why education needs to include enterprise (she started Graven instead of doing industrial placement), digital as a package for analogue (it stills needs people) and why we need less ‘spreadsheet monkeys’ numbers are symbols of other kinds of values.

Why do creative industries need to justify their value? This question kept coming up. Defence doesn’t have to justify spending $400 million on fighter jets that don’t work properly as Krishna from RSNO said.

It got me thinking about;

How schools can encourage multidisciplinary thinking and engagement (I’ve met more artists, illustrators, designers working than I did at University)

Here are my notes 🙂

Joined up thinking // passion, authenticity & producing/

I was doing a storyboarding workshop with a couple of teenagers in Glasgows southside. Both girls were passionate about art and brilliant artists. We got chatting about what they want to do after high school. .

“I am going to study art at college” said one girl,

“I want to study childcare” said the other

“Really? But you love art” her friend was surprised

“Yeah if I study it it’ll become work. If I do it on the side it’ll still be fun”

It got me thinking again about “following your passion” (see my previous blog post). This is the mantra that the millennial generation, my generation, has grown up with. Love what you do.

Most of us are looking for job satisfaction.

As documentary PressPausePlay explores, we have more opportunities than ever before. Look at how the internet has democratized access. Anybody can be a director, filmmaker, artist, musician, entrepreneur, and expert….

Yet it’s even harder to be HEARD.

Yet we seem to be no more satisfied than any other generation. There is now such a thing as a quarter life crises.

Steve Jobs is probably the most famous advocate for doing what you love. In his Stanford Commencement speech he encourages

“You’ve got to find what you love, don’t settle”

Do what you love = success

We now think that if you do what you love, you will be happy, you will be a success. With that comes enormous pressure.

Unlike on the x-factor where everyone knew they wanted to be a singer when were 3, few us have an epiphany moment.

Follow your passion” assumes: a) you have a preexisting passion, and b) if you match this to your job, then you’ll enjoy that job

….Excitement comes and goes. True passion arises after you’ve put in the long hours to really become a craftsman in your field and can then leverage this value to really have an impact” Cal Newport, the minimalists.com

 

Cal Newport encourages us to rethink the idea of following your passion.

Rethink success.

The version of success we see all the time is

          – The attainment of fame, wealth, or social status

PERFECTION

but

Success is also

     – The achievement of something, desired, planned or attempted.

The key here is to attempt. Try.

 

“Most people are so scared to loose they don’t even try” Kanye West.

“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm” Winston Churchill

It means being vulnerable. You might fail. But there is a beauty in vulnerability.

It means being open and honest.

It means finding your voice.

(“Just be yourself,” another millennial mantra)

“Say what you mean and mean what you say. If you have an opinion you must say it and take the flack for it” Tony Benn, Last Will and Testament

If like me you constantly want to be liked, this is easier said than done.

The great news is that you express your voice by producing. Make as much stuff as you can, make stuff that makes your friends go wow. This blog is one way to produce, to express my honest ideas, opinions and thoughts.

Don’t know what to do? You just have to begin. Find things that you’re drawn to, things that frustrate you.

Keep going, it’ll come to you (that’s what they all say).

Time + doing= mastery

“To find success there is to find your own path, only way to find that path is to act, to start going” Casey Neistat, Tim Ferriss Podcast

“Always produce” is also a heuristic for finding the work you love….

….. what you should not do, I think is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world” Paul Graham, How to do what you love

“Get out of your own way, as soon as your ego gets in the way, and you go I don’t know if I know what to do next, you’ve already put “I” in front of it and blocked it a little bit.

…..Not knowing what’s gonna happen, but you trust it’ll be there. That when you put the brush on the canvas it’ll know where to go. The trust comes first.

…. It’s not gonna come for you if you just sit there waiting for it to happen. You have to act. As soon as you step forward even a little bit it starts sweeping you away.” Robert Rodriguez on Tim Ferriss podcast

I love interviews and biographies and I’ve have found that the common thing between so many people we perceive as “successful” is that they are attempting to make the world better in some way.

However there are no two people in the same position in the same field that had the same journey. After all we all have different starting points! It’s often a series of seemingly random decisions. That’s the good news and the bad news. So how do we know which decisions are right.

“Instinct and ideas. That’s what it’s all about” John Carpenter on the Directors Chair.

Trust your instinct and move on them, make decisions, with incomplete information. No one knows the answers. There are no answers. Again PRODUCE>

Cultivate your instinct. This needs us to be present and be open. It’s challenging in our current culture of distraction. Taking time, even a few moments a day, for “you” can work wonders. Whatever suits, journaling, meditating, praying, exercising…

<Producing means you can get good at being you.

You don’t have to be unique; you don’t have to be special. You have to be “you.”

And your “you” isn’t one thing all the time.

“Life is about integrating different parts of yourself and finding you authentic self. Your authentic self has a lot of dimensions.” Isabel Guerrero

Being our authentic self is probably the hardest thing we can do.

                                              It’s the most liberating thing we can do.

I’m on the quest to produce, find and amplify my actual self. I don’t know how the journey will go, but join me if you wish 🙂

For more reading, watching and listening here are my favourites!

John Waters commencement speech

The art of being yourself, Caroline McHugh

Neil Gainman commencement speech

 The Power of Vulnerability, Brene Brown

 6 Harsh Thruths That Will Make You a Better Person, David Wong

 Robert Rodriguez interview on the Tim Ferriss Podcast

Create more value than you capture, Tim O’Reilly

How to do what you love, Paul Graham 

(That’s enough thinking for one day!)

Addition 25/11/15

Some more interesting observations in this Tim Ferriss interview with Will MaCaskill (listen from about 1hr 25mins in). Talk about the dangerous myth of the dream job.

Most people dont have work related passions (as Cal Newport explains)

our preferences and passions change as we get older

& passion may not last past the when its an obligation and not an option.

 The biggest predictor of job satisfaction is mentally engaging work. Work with variety, good feedback, meaningful in some way and allows you to exercise and develop your skills.

Interestingly Will encourages us to look at our 80,000 work hours as stages in our lives and not as a one path career. So it’s about building a broad range of skills including meta skills that we can transfer. And thinking about the futurenow (as a friend of mine calls it), looking at what we can focus on now to maximise the long term.

His enterprise 80000 Hours has some more great insights (80000hours.org)

How I got into Socially Driven Design

Katie Crepeau’s recent blog post on Design Affect got me thinking about why and how I got into Public interest design, Impact Design, socially driven design, humanitarian design or people centred design, however you want to call it. I realized that there wasnt a single moment that lead me to this, more a series of small moments that pulled me in this direction. I’m still very much at the start of my career and learning in this field but it is interesting to look back at the random steps that led me here. 

 I found my personal statement which I used to apply to university a few months ago. In it I wrote of comparing the environment I saw in my community, with the unwelcoming buildings, graffiti and general air of neglect to that of places like Canary Wharf which seemed to gleam and shine. I remember feeling like good design could make an impact in the way people see themselves. It was one of the reasons I got into architecture, I felt like we all had the right to live in beautiful places. 

 Through undergrad I didn’t really think much about this field. My first exposure to it was a lecture by Anna Heringer. She told us about her building in India, and how she’d used the process as a tool for educating the local community and architects about designing sustainably and for the climate. Telling us about the desire for western architecture and how that didn’t work with the climate and even culture. It was amazing to see, my friend and I left the lecture being like this is why we decided to study architecture.

 Another moment was the OMA exhibition at the Barbican, I barely remember any of it but I picked up a piece of paper with some text that has almost become my mantra. I have no idea who wrote it or why but it is a statement that resonates with me totally. 

 
Creatification-

The role of the creative class should be less receiving, rather broader, faithful and responsive

-Economic call

-Social necessity

-Moral obligation 

 During my summer holidays I tried to work for architectures office to build my experience and then worked for two more in my year out. I found working in the office environment difficult, I would get so bored, so easily. And although I ended up working or doing work experiences with about 7 offices I never found one that clicked with me. I loved the people I worked with, enjoyed the projects but just didn’t find them stimulating. It was really interesting to see how much the client and sometimes quantity surveyor drove the project.

It was only when I started my Diploma (the last 2 years of architecture course) that I started to be more exposed to this field and maybe even think about it as a legitimate career path. My dissertation was quite pivotal. I wanted to write about Lagos in Nigeria. I was between writing about a development for middle income clients or a slum called Makoko that I’d somehow come across. And I had a meeting with one of the tutors impressed on me that I had a key choice to make.

This project continued into my thesis project where I designed a maternity centre for Makoko. Again it was having a fantastic tutor while I was on exchange in Vienna that encouraged me to do this. Despite it being totally different from what everyone back in Glasgow was doing.

Final year was tricky, everyone was talking about what they wanted to do next and I knew I didn’t want to go back to working in a traditional office, but I didn’t feel like I had enough courage to go out on my own and do it. There was a symposium at the University, Clean Conscience Dirty Hands that was organised by one of the tutors, who had set up his own humanitarian design studio as a 19yr old student (and is now my colleague). I think that was the biggest turning point for me. Seeing the speakers from a range of countries all working in this field whether in the UK or abroad, made me realize that it was possible. I was still scared of course, I told my brother that the longer I waited to start the more fear would set in.

Since then it’s been a total whirlwind and I am learning so much about people centred design and making a positive impact in communities. I can’t believe I graduated last year.

Lean Startup Meets Design Thinking

Glasgow Global Service Design Jam

Stop talking start doing!

Kill your babies!

I took part in the Glasgow Global service jam this weekend. It was a last minute decision but I’m so glad I did it. My first service jam and it was an amazing experience. Lots of lovely people and lots of lovely food.

The Global Service Jam is a yearly event where participants from a range of fields are given 48 hours to create a service that could change the world. This year was the 5th Global Service Jam. I’ve just started learning about service design but it is all about designing services around people, in order improve the relationship and interaction between the provider and the end users. The Glasgow Jam was run by Snook, the team were absolutely fantastic!

We started on Friday with the top secret brief being revealed. This year it was an image of a piece paper being folded into a fortune teller. We brainstormed words or images that came to our minds from this. First as a big group then in smaller groups, even looking at opposites to what we were coming up with. Themes soon began to emerge and we formed teams based on them. I ended up with the amazing exploration team, Team Columbus with a great group of people. It was so much fun. Each team came up with a brief and a problem we were going to explore.

We decided to explore extreme use of technology by teenagers in the Glasgow area. With a focus on products or services which offer an opportunity of alternatives to the addictive nature of digital appliances, tools and apps – with the aim of moderating such behaviours and allowing this specific age group the freedom to step out of their virtual world.

I missed most of saturday when Team Columbus went out in the street to speak to the young people of Glasgow about their technology use habits. Interestingly they found that a lot of the teens they spoke to talked about the fear of missing out.  And made the first prototype, a social space for teenagers. On sunday there was a real push to start doing, we decided to use a persona and act out a prototype. We wanted to create a modern social space, where young people could be active and technology could be incorporated to encourage meaningful interaction.

Here’s what we made!

The best part was seeing how much the ideas changed from the starting point and seeing the range of services people came up with from using drawing to alleviate awkward situations to internet free restaurants. The range of techniques we used to explore our ideas from prototypes to personas were great and we could experiment without the fear of failure. But what I learned from the weekend was to just do it instead of talking about doing it.

Thanks again Snook and Team Columbus!

http://www.gsjglasgow.tumblr.com/

The Empowerment Plan

An inspiring example of how design and entrepreneurial thinking can make a positive social impact from the Detroit based Empowerment Plan, started by Veronika Scott, a 24 year old entrepreneur and product designer. Veronika has designed a a coat that turns into a sleeping bag for the homeless. But its more than that. She has created an organisation employs women that are homeless and sleeping in shelters, providing them with and income and hope. As she describes a woman once told her “coats are pointless we need jobs.”

It reminds me of a quote from Mohammad Yanus “when I see a problem I create a business to solve it.”

Find out more at http://www.empowermentplan.org/