An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth

Written in 1998, the Incomplete Manifesto is an articulation of statements exemplifying Bruce Mau’s beliefs, strategies and motivations.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child).Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.
5. Go deep.The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.
6. 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.
7. Study.A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.
8. Drift.Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.
9. Begin anywhere.John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.
10. Everyone is a leader.Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. Slow down.Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.
14. Don’t be cool.Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.
15. 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.
16. Collaborate.The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.
17. ____________________.Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.
18. 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.
19. Work the metaphor.Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.
20. 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.
21. Repeat yourself.If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.
22. 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.
23. 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.
24. Avoid software.The problem with software is that everyone has it.
25. Don’t clean your desk.You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.
26. Don’t enter awards competitions.Just don’t. It’s not good for you.
27. Read only left-hand pages.Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our “noodle.”
28. 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.
29. Think with your mind.Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.
30. Organization = Liberty.Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively 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.’
31. 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.
32. 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.
33. 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–simulated environment.
34. Make mistakes faster.This isn’t my idea — I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.
35. 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.
36. Scat.When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else … but not words.
37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.
38. 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.
39. 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.
40. 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.
41. 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.
42. 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.
43. 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.

Machinima

shooting film - Cameras record the action going on.
in a realtime 3d – the time needed for the computer to transform the abstract data into a 3-dimensional visible representation is so little that you do not notice it. The whole calculation takes less than 1/10th of a second. Thus the term “realtime”.
virtual environment – the actors aren’t human, but virtual Avatars or Objects, controlled by user input or scripting and act in a virtual world that is simulated using a computer game.

Machinima (pronounced [mə.ˈʃiː.nə.mə] or [mə.ˈʃɪ.nə.mə]), a portmanteau of machine cinema or machine animation, is both a collection of associated production techniques and a film genre defined by those techniques.

Actually, it was a typo thing that led to the integration of the term animation. Originally the word “machinima” was just machine and cinema. But somehow it’s fashionable and nice to have animation in there, right?

National Design Policy

Did you know India has a National Design Policy?

i. preparation of a platform for creative design development, design promotion and partnerships across many sectors, states, and regions for integrating design with traditional and technological resources;
ii. presentation of Indian designs and innovations on the international arena through strategic integration and cooperation with international design organizations;
iii. global positioning and branding of Indian designs and making ‘Designed in India’ a by-word for quality and utility in conjunction with ‘Made in India’ and ‘Served from India’;
iv. promotion of Indian design through a well defined and managed regulatory, promotional and institutional framework;
v. raising Indian design education to global standards of excellence;
vi. creation of original Indian designs in products and services drawing upon India’s rich craft traditions and cultural heritage;
vii. making India a major hub for exports and outsourcing of designs and creative process for achieving a design-enabled innovation economy;
viii. enhancing the overall tangible and intangible quality parameters of products and services through design;
ix. creation of awareness among manufacturers and service providers, particularly SMEs and cottage industries, about the competitive advantage of original designs;
x. attracting investments, including foreign direct investments, in design services and design related R&D;
xi. involving industry and professional designers in the collaborative development of the design profession.

The strategy to achieve this vision would focus on strengthening quality design education at different levels, encouraging use of designs by small scale and cottage industries and crafts, facilitating active involvement of industry and designers in the development of the design profession, branding and positioning of Indian design within India and overseas, enhancing design and design service exports, and creating an enabling environment that recognizes and rewards original designs.

Draft National Design Policy (pdf) (dated October 2005)

Korea: Design Policy Plan
Dutch Design Foundation’s Policy Plan

John Thackara on Design Policy
Bureau of European Designers Association on Design Policy

UK Design Council: Design policy actions for Government
Japan: Toward the New Design of Competition Policy

Graffiti

The fascination of painting on walls is perhaps symptomatic of the need of the youth to have a say in the running and use of public spaces, perhaps with more enthusiasm than planning, nevertheless making an ephemeral though independent contribution. The aim is to decorate the urban landscape with colours. City landscapes change and if they can keep up with new ideas are visually less violent. Graffiti done under cover of a pseudonym have various aims, different purposes, somewhat complex and confused, and maybe contradictory since they are the products of youth. This can be said to have two ends.

One of these is rough and ready, close to painting slogans on a wall, and is clearly seeking self-advertisement; this type of work is the work of those who leave their signature or tag and are the original graffiti writers, aware that what they do is illegal and therefore unpopular; “Nobody likes having graffiti painted on their door”. Serving the community, or making space available for free expression in the centre and outskirts of cities could be an alternative.

The other extreme is more sophisticated and nearer to painting murals, which for centuries was a synonym for painting. This type has an aesthetic objective, forms part of the architectural structure, is inscribed on walls and their surroundings and fulfills pre-determined functions.

Urban graffiti has been evolving and the side effects have included commercial and aesthetic interests; the primitive gesture of modern graffiti, the self-expression of those who feel themselves to be a minority, the search for the respect and recognition of fellow-citizens, give a sense of sub-culture to dissident groups or those who feel excluded from the established system. This artistic manifestation of popular culture is analysed by anthropologists as having documentary value, and is also appreciated by sociologists and historians as bearing witness to the present times. From an artistic viewpoint, it offers an evocative wealth of graphic contamination, “The roots, trunk and branches of a movement called graffiti” have developed easily identifiable styles; for this to happen, there must be dialogue and mixing, critical and intense interchange, between graffiti writers and the society in which they live. Some predators, aware of this reality, creative designers in publishing and advertising were the first to phagocyte images and attitudes for application in publicity campaigns with sales methods aimed at the highest spending sectors of the consumer market. Paradoxically, many youth who started by painting illegally in the streets have ended up working in advertising or designing. Others have taken up painting or sculpture as a continuation of their adolescent enthusiasm for graffiti.