No Walk in the Park

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Karnataka State in India is considering a Design Park along the lines of one in Dubai. Design is on everyone’s mind. Creative Economies are engines of growth, and the UK, as one example, has done a great job in making that real.

Could parks such as these alone become engines for the creative economy, or, does one need a more thoughtful approach to creating innovation ecosystems?

I am critical of such efforts, as I have seen a history of them not having enduring power. I advocate a deeper approach from a long-term societal development perspective, which is perhaps less spectacular.

In India, Industrial Parks have come and gone — there were software parks, electronic cities, and export zones and I am sure there are many that escape my memory. I do not believe any of them have made any substantial difference to the landscape, given our global standings in these areas. What made an enduring difference, was the Public Sector for example, much of  which is now on sale.

The fad of the day is a pretext to a spectacle — a big investment — some people, usually in construction and infrastructure will make a lot of money. Somebody who had access to a political ear, whispered promises and lullabies that fed into the hunger for finding a place on the world stage.

Not embedded in a wider culture, all these spectacles eventually die, as they need to wall themselves off behind gated communities, and mostly serve people elsewhere, to survive. There are perhaps now more graveyards than parks of these bygone eras.

So, here then comes yet another grand initiative.

As has been the general trend of ‘development’ in Bangalore in the past — one will need to go even farther off to find real estate, for it will demand huge amount of land. And, wherever they find that place, will be difficult to commute to — adding to the woes of this unfortunate city and its congestion and traffic woes.

And, all this in a society that is broadly not sensitive to design in its popular sense. All you need to do is check what is offered in most of the design schools across the country and the courses that are high in demand even in the best ones.

One of the NIIT founders (Mr. Thadani) several years ago, had rightly recognized that the country needed a quality consciousness. He was going to set up quality institutes along the lines of NIIT. Guess where that went?

The ideas of design, embedded in projects such as these, essentially feed the consumer economy driven engines — serving fashion and fad. It will perhaps, and in all likelihood, have very little impact on the well-being of the average citizen.

I have personally experienced what is mostly called ‘design’ — whether in the form of products or services. The lesser we talk about services the better — for neither design, nor quality exist in the so-called ‘back office’ of the world — clearly having learned nothing from what it means to provide quality services abroad.

Trickle-down theories do not work for sure. There are other forms of diffusion, and these are certainly not conceived strategically that way.

Product quality is a sham — there is much consciousness about “Brand” for sure — for there is excellence in but one field — Advertising — and the worlds of make-believe. Beware if you go deep under the covers of what you consume.

In the small town where I spent a little over a year recently, you could buy Zeiss lenses, except they did not know how to fit them into your frames, you could buy luxury paints, except the painters did not know what a good painting job looked like.

But, we do make exquisite jingles, and brand consciousness is high.

So, here comes another sham spectacle on a large stage — like other parks this too will wither and die.

Perhaps, I do not sound hopeful here. However, there is indeed an alternative, there always is — it is not in the spectacular and it will take hard work, and institution building and culture building, which is unfortunately not on the menu. It takes gumption, spine and understanding, and that is no walk in the park.

Rehearsing for theater and Design Research

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A conversation this morning, and this happened between long-time friends from the amateur theater world in Bangalore India, prompted this post. It occurred to me that rehearsals, which often lasted a couple of months or more, provided a direct experience in what it might mean in order to ‘make’ in a design studio for insight.

If a theater group stays with a production, then there is more that happens in terms of learning over time, as the play evolves and matures in its later iterations. I will come to that aspect of learning in some later post.

Here is a little background. Almost forty years ago, I got to become a part of an amateur theater group, Gnatak, in Bangalore, India. Pronounced ‘Natak’ (naa tuck), the Indian word for theater, the ‘G’ in the front of its spelling had many interpretations, left deliberately open. Every now and then, people would wonder and come up with some interpretation of what that letter might stand for —and in the process it seemed to provide a constantly evolving construction of identity.

That is a fascinating thought to explore, perhaps later — how posing an enigma creates a new language and grammar, opening up spaces for conversation and leaving a mystery in its trail for ongoing wonderment and fluid redefinition.

The motley group of college students, professional engineers, activists, artists, journalists, business people — fluidly came together around some sort of a permanent core of maybe eight or ten regulars, to produce on an average three to four plays a year. I happened to be there for almost five years during this intense period, until professional and other personal forces did their centrifugal magic.

At some other time, I will perhaps also write about the amazing productivity of the group’s informal organization, a concept I leveraged in my role as a Business Leader in an American Multinational to great success. It works!

The thought that got me to write this morning has to do with how the rehearsal process, a subset of the totality that was Gnatak for me, was a fascinating creative experience, a process whereby dead scripts and texts were brought to life.

The scripts, often written for a foreign, non-Indian context, (because we were all WAIP — Westernized, Anglo-Indian People), needed to be in English, the language we who came from across the country shared and were fluent in, often were about second hand-experiences.

These narratives were about strange contexts that we only had second-hand information, knowledge or understanding of. We were global citizens in some sense because of our upbringing and schooling, even though most of our knowledge beyond India was second or third-hand. However, we were merely in the face of huge unknowns that we needed to navigate over the course of the rehearsal months.

The not knowing too much about the context perhaps was an interesting prerequisite for our creativity — as we could make whatever meaning we wanted, giving it the accents of our looks, worldviews, ideas, and Indian-English manners of speaking in the process.

Somehow, through a process of initial probatory readings, a play was picked, because it produced some intuitive sense of its potential — it supposedly had ‘ghum’, another fluid word that in essence suggested a kind of radical exciting energy. 

Random contextual conditions would then decide what followed — who was available to act, who had time to direct, what spaces were available for rehearsal etc. 

Amateur theaters did not have permanent rehearsal spaces, which in afterthought is extremely conducive to creativity. All kinds of social networks came to life to find us somewhere we could practice. Often schools would let us use their halls to rehearse after hours, ignoring some of the social life and language that came with what characterized our unique sociality. 

But, when the gates were closed and lights turned off for the evening, there were always the streets lights under which one could go on into the early hours of the morning, timing determined by how late one could find restaurants that served tea. That is another fascinating dimension of an amateur theater ecosystem one must delve into later.

Every day the rehearsals were a revelation. One understood more about some nuance of the author’s intentions, historical context, the particular use of language, strange words that evoked our own made up meanings etc. Sometimes these revelations were radical and surprising. 

But, there was something else that happened that was perhaps more important for me. As we gave birth to these strange worlds as surrogates, who was acting, how they felt that day, and how they felt about each other, changed what happened on a given evening.  And, in that happening, something more opened up in the possibility spaces of the play’s worlds – Way beyond perhaps what the playwright might have had in mind. Every day these inter-personal dynamics changed what the play might have meant and what it meant to us.

This was a unique process of insight generation and it would definitely not have happened without the immersion and its youthful intensity. Some of the best and most interesting performances happened during these evenings and early hours of the morning on a street corner somewhere. 

There is one thing one learns from this process — there are no guarantees, irrespective of how much the idea is to concretize and capture the production of experience in a repeatable manner, that you will see something again. Not even on the day of the performance are you assured of a reproduction of your best rehearsal moments, though there is always the possibility of surprises on the day of the performance itself.

What a gift it is then to witness the evolution of meaning-making during the rehearsal, and not just some notion of a final version on the day of the public performance.

What then does this have to do with design research one might ask.

One watches a public performance of everyday life, in some kind of an ethnographic study sense. One brings back snapshots, and artifacts, and tries to capture and make sense of what those things might mean, looking for some kind of an essence beyond the literality of the spectacle and through that reflection reveal the scripts and the generative, productive processes — that are the ’sutras’ and the ‘mantras’, the signature patterns of the people we observe.

Gnatak too had a signature style — a very distinctive approach to what plays we chose to perform and how we did them. There are stories about how some other groups tried to do the same plays several decades later, and left audiences yearning for the return of the original.

Those signatures are what one is searching for too in society, the purpose of the research. 

It is the human collective that produces the human agents that is the intention of our understanding and quest. What for example, are the scripts in operation and how do we produce our responses to Covid or Climate Change? 

We can uncover the secrets of our improvisations and we could learn something from theater and the rehearsal process in particular about how to go backstage and get to those invisible authors of our lives.

Strategic Thinking – the need for a philosophical approach to finding creative alternatives.

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A colleague just returning from teaching creativity in a Corporate setting expressed the need for logic and philosophy in education as a prerequisite. He seemed somewhat frustrated by the experience. I have had similar experiences working with not just design students, but people in positions that need to make strategic decisions, and need to grapple with and navigate complexity.

One advocates stepping out of the box, taking a broader, deeper and temporally expansive perspective, but almost universally, people in practical professions (managers, engineers, designers) seem to find it difficult.

There is a general cultural anathema to being strategic – what with thought leaders advocating ‘failing fast’ and experimentation as antidotes. Well we have a litany of failures in the world to show that the latter process only works occasionally (statistically low probabilities of success) though it is massively celebrated in popular culture.

In my opinion, t is not a pattern that one should really practice, particularly by those who need to think about bigger issues. This is not an argument against experimentation or probing, practices integral to innovation, and creativity is an important driver.

Questioning and critical practice that go hand-in-hand with being strategic (by strategic, I mean those issues that have broader and deeper impact on the world and demand creative impact making), are not practiced enough in the face of urgent action. Being strategic takes time, and there are no easy solutions often except what gets resolved through conversations.

Somewhere in our broader education system we have lost this foundational ability to abstract in our pursuit of the concrete and immediate. By the broader system, I include more than just formal educational institutions – we find a general societal loss of an appetite for deeper thought and conversations. We were supposed to be an ‘Argumentative Society’ (In India at least). You can only be creative in a culture of creativity in which creative acts happen – creativity is not a private pastime or something you practice in fishbowls.

A recent experience witnessed a design studio with floor-to-ceiling glass and you could see people practicing design – design as spectacle.

Creativity flourishes in cultures of positive dissent and pushback. Clarity of purpose and meaning are the logic that shapes – it can be constraining or creative. I tried teaching people to be creative where they had to return to authoritarian cultures where questioning was the first step to career hara-kiri. And anyway wisdom was expected to trickle-down, or rooted in some antiquity. Of course there were enough marketing tropes about ‘navigating the future’ or some equally insipid marketing blah.

There might be an easier approach than having people study philosophy though – one can arrive at a philosophical attitude through the process of learning to think in abstract terms. 

I found most young designers have difficulties with abstractions and with identifying patterns and meta patterns – being able to get to the essence of something. Architectural thinking is perhaps a good way to begin.

Getting to the essence of something is like getting to the genetic code of that object – locating a generative core. Complex situations need us to find these deeper patterns – conceptual, ideological, even spiritual – for they hold much power to shape or constrain.

Complex humanity (ahh human-centered design!!) – is multi-dimensional, and one seems to want to approach it with little knowledge of sociology, or history, or politics, or civics, or even a deeper why of ones own cultural practices – where blind faith comes from I guess. Such is the deplorable state of our education systems – the depths of siloed expertise being such an obstacle to understanding let alone synthesis – the ability to find connections and relationships and coherence and meaning – to create practical holistic spaces for action.

Only when we loosen those deep structures will creative alternatives emerge. In order to do that we have to get past the literal. We will need language and grammar, and a comfort with uncertainty that is the wellspring of all that is creative. It is where our hope lies – just advocating for creativity – and that is a trope that I do not think popular discourse really understands. Making cute drawings you forgot to make after childhood will not get you there.

Once we learn to see and appreciate patterns, we begin to understand similarities and differences and what is universal and what common, and what deeper causes that are generally hidden from our perspectives are operational in our lives. The ‘logic’ of living human patterns is what we need.

And, from that practice comes the practice of meta-patterning, and that is where hope lies. That practice of meta-patterning is the foundation of philosophy or at least being philosophical and not necessarily being a philosopher in some academic sense.

Strategic design touches all branches of philosophy, except not as it is practiced. One must think about phenomenology, epistemology, ontology, ethics, axiology and so on, in order to be a good strategic designer. If you truly are a good strategic designer, you must be a philosopher too – chicken and egg of causality here.

Grappling with complexity as practice in search of patterns and reflecting on patterns back in the studio in search of meta patterns, that is philosophical and that can lead to strategic creativity. Those that can deal with MetaPatterns can begin to become Strategic MetaDesigners.

 

Note: – (MetaDesign is a framework I have been developing – a practice that lead complex Human Evolutionary Social Systems to better futures – a mouthful alright – CHESS, Living Enterprises, Better Futures ).