On the occasion of having read yet another fawning blowjob for Bruce Mau (“that sound you hear is the knees of designers hitting the floor as they genuflect before the great man”) and his “,” there’s no time like the present for:

An Annotated Manifesto for Growth

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.

Dude, could swear this was a Rod McKuen poem.

Setting the tone of comfort and assurance, welcoming the potential client in on a world that until now has seemed mysterious and beguiling: the mind of the Artist.

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.

And after the opening group hug, a little roughness for cred, to set the mood, to establish the strength of the points herein.

Fear not, gentle executive, gentle media buyer. We are creative, we brave conflict to make beauty.

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.

Unfiltered bullshit. This is the cult of the designer’s ego writ large. Can’t charge a fortune for mere craftsmanship; chequebooks only come out for Art.

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.

As Tom Peters would shriek, “Fail spectacularly!!”

Straight out of the Wall Street Journal bestseller list: “See, we’re just like you, we grind profit from what the sluggish consider loss. Radical, eh?”

5

Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

I.e., the identity for Roots.

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.

Reworded think-outside-the-box bromide #1.

7

Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.

Do research? Gosh.

8

Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.

Reworded think-outside-the-box bromide #2.

9

Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

The inevitable tenuous reference to the avant garde. Cage is dead and gone, unable to complain about being hauled out as a brand. You need not understand, just let it augment your lifestyle.

10

Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.

Boilerplate boosterism, present in every office everywhere. No bad ideas. My door is always open. There is no I in team.

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.

Never, ever let the work speak for itself. Dance, jump, perform, reference, apply yourself, your enthusiasms: stay on the other side of the looking glass. They might ask why the type is so hard to read.

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.

Cher robber baron, you see, we understand that business is about living 18 months in the future, of drawing maps for lands that don’t exist.

13

Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.

And this is why the sketches were late.

14

Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.

We don’t acknowledge cool. Isn’t that cool?

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.

Reworded think-outside-the-box bromide #3.

16

Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.

Pure pandering to the One Minute Manager. “Your annual report came to look like this, and cost this much, because of some performance art I did in Gstaad with Znaimer.”

17

————————. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.

Egad.

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.

Translation: the best work is done, the most inspiration comes, from the only real muse: Fear. Especially the fear of what’s due in the morning.

19

Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.

Except the one about design being frosting to tart up crap to make it saleable. Don’t work that one.

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.

Reworded think-outside-the-box bromide #4.

21

Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.

After all, it’s what YOU like that matters. Relax: you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time! Templates equal profit.

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.

You are an artist. Your accounts receivable department is your tool. Your account planners are tools. You, Mr Vice President of Branding and Identity, are a tool.

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.

Amateurs imitate, professionals steal.

24

Avoid software. The problem with software is that everyone has it.

What does this mean? The problem with air is that everyone breathes?

25

Don’t clean your desk. You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.

The box now fully broken, you cannot help but think outside it.

26

Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. It’s not good for you.

See point 14.

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.”

Fear of content, summarized.

This from a designer who imagines that heaven might be “a place without text.”

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.

Take a look, oh beloved plutocrat, at your bookcase! Brandwidth! Envisioneering! Synergize! Aren’t these words dazzling?

29

Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.

Reworded think-outside-the-box bromide #5

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.’

The pièce de résistance. A veritable tongue bath to those who sign the cheques.

In one short paragraph: first principles of MBA strategy, reassurance (again) that design IS business, something about that museum the Mrs wants to go to next holiday, Frank Gehry, Leonard Cohen, and aren’t we all real creative.

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.

Point 30 reworded.

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.

Points 16 and 10 reworded.

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.

How else could you possibly justify charging so much for a logotype flung together out of Franklin Gothic?

34

Make mistakes faster. This isn’t my idea — I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.

You know, from Intel.
(Ignore point 13 here)

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.

Points 21 and 23 reworded, with another layer of scammed avant garde, though the example is just so completely wrongheaded: like citing Oasis repurposing the Beatles.

Underused? Under fucking used?

36

Scat. When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else … but not words.

Interpretive dance in the studio. Think about it.

37

Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.

Do it on time, do it on budget, or get the hell out of Dodge.

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.

Techniques put to use by every single creative person ever to walk the planet.

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.

The smug implication of elite discourse away from the plebes, of forming strategic alliances while the sheep toil back at the office, of winking and beckoning to the very heart of greed power, that come off this paragraph are truly astonishing.

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.

Reworded think-outside-the-box bromide #6

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.

I said LAUGH.

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.

Points 21, 23 and 35 reworded.

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.

I knew Tibor Kalman. Tibor Kalman was a friend of mine. You, sir, are no Tibor Kalman.