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In Search of the Creative Zero

by Ko Nakatsu

They wanted me to read to them. The book, carefully chosen, was about Oliver the Elephant who wanted to grow up and be a dancing circus elephant. So I asked the kids what they wanted to be when they grew up. I had just read the page about the girl who wanted to be cowgirl so Logan, three years old, going along said “I want to be a cowgirl!”. I thought to myself “oh how cute”.
Then I asked Lucienne, who was slightly younger, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”
He stood up and yelled “I want to be a spider!”
“Hahaha, you mean Spiderman.”
“Nooooo, a Spider!”

There I was, only hours before trying to figure out how I can progress my career in design, full of hair-pulling frantic stress, and he wanted to be a spider! Three years old, his career options was limitless. More importantly, his creativity to approach a question was limitless.

I saw Gijs Bakker of Droog Design speak at the Wats:On festival in Pittsburgh. The slide show of Droog’s past works was absolutely fascinating, but in the middle of the lecture, he challenged the crowd: “Dare to go to zero”. I burned those five words into my soul. A derivative of Buckminster Fuller’s “Dare to be naïve”, that notion, that challenge to be zero is yet to be achieved. I presume it’ll take another decade to reach zero. When you’re three years old, you’re already there, at the Creative Zero, where creativity is limitless.

I’ve come across similar phrases along the years and the example of the Creative Zero has emerged in numerous places. Tom Wujec challenged different groups to build the tallest tower out of spaghetti and marshmallows. CEOs did a little bit better than average, but Kindergartners did even better. Their process was better. They kept going back to the Creative Zero, but learning as they progressed. The Creative Zero isn’t about going back to ignorance, it’s the world where everything is seen from fresh eyes with a respect of what you just tried.

I’m looking for Creative Zero where I can be a spider, a cloud, a fire hydrant. When I can get there, my designs will be limitless.

Friday, September 10, 2010
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Artists Punched My Uncreative Face In

by Ko Nakatsu

Artists have a focus to their work. The freedom and limited constraints, forces them to look internally and search for a meaning to infuse into their creation. With less outside-constraints comes a need to self-focus. In a zen-like state, the focus comes from within.

Unlike design, they don’t have to consider the market, the audience, manufacturability, ergonomics, etc. So they define their artwork for themselves. This narrowing and internal search is where the creativity explodes into brilliance.

Designers on the other hand, we get complacent. We’re so used to outside directives, we’re so used to a range of outside considerations to incorporate in our designwork, that we create formulas and processes to make sense of it all. The unrealized consequence is that we start to seek inspiration from out there as well. We’re so used to seeking answers out there that we don’t look in here (imagine me pointing outward and then at my own chest). We make “image boards” with products that already exist, we present to the executives with justifications to appease them, and we confidently send market-defined designs. We do this because it succeeds, but it’s not the most creative.

The shoe-making undergrad class at the renowned School of the Art Institute of Chicago broke me out of this design-world cocoon and taught me to search within for answers to design problems.

I was Naive to think we can design anything (without knowing and learning more)
Shoes. It’s a product. I got a degree in design. I can certainly design shoes… right? Erick Geer Wilcox crafts shoes by hand. He taught the course and knows everything there is to know about shoe-making. (check out his blog here). He had equipment after equipment that I’ve never seen before, specifically for this shoe-making art. They didn’t have these tools in the ID woodshop. With my lack of experience with the 3-D sewing machine, skiving leather, and the lack of knowledge of analyzing a hide of leather, my shoe, came out like crap. I kept the ugliness to remind myself to respect every field of creative study.

I was Mirroring External Creativity
At the time of the class I was pretty excited about the Smart car coming out and so I slapped it on my image board and designed some footwear based on that. Designers do this all of the time. The other students in the class? The other artists? Their designs were inspired by taxadermy, historical criminals, poverty in the Phillipines, and human flesh. My inspiration, the Smart Car. Their inspiration, Taxadermy!? Human Flesh!? I was shocked and delighted. It’s like someone punched me in the face with a big creative tack hammer wrapped in dead flesh. What I thought was absurd was quite normal in the art school. I had become complacent and only used design to inspire design. This limited my creativity.

I wasn’t Internalizing the World
I was only consuming design. In my blind love for the profession I was reading design, drawing design, watching design. To design for the world I thought it was important to learn about the world from the perspective of design. I was wrong. Merely understanding the world is not enough to develop creative solutions to the problems. I had to internalize it, just as artists do. I had to store it all in at the core and see what emerged, then use that as the fuel for the design. This led me to new inspirations from the entire world, from galleries and underground art scenes, from etymology to poetry, from thinking to doing. To be creative is to internalize the world.

Art and design are different fields, but at the core lies the marrows of creativity from which my design life was saved. The artists showed me what true creativity was and I vow to never forget again. It’s an everyday practice that takes me to the absurd and to the appropriate back again and again, for the very first time.

Thursday, September 9, 2010
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Stupidass Question: What’s the Top Design School in the Woooorld?

by Ko Nakatsu

I started to search for a pattern in a discussion forum talking about who they thought was the top design school in the world. I read every post. I wrote down the school and the reasons given on why it was the top. Most reasons were “because I said so” with a descriptor like “fantastic” “great” “outstanding” and “good”. Other popular reasons were: anecdotal references (self-pride, hired someone, know friends), reference to established brand stereotypes, reference to historical figures, association with prestigious employers, and relationship of faculty. These arguments are too general to distinguish the schools apart.

Conclusion of reading through all those posts? With 66 schools mentioned out of 97 comments. That’s a lot of schools with not much consensus, which means there’s no such thing as a “top” school. It’s the wrong question anyway. Schools aren’t intended to be a top-down tower stacked on top of each other. Each exist for some particular purpose and it’s disingenuous to the students and the profession to rank schools by arbitrary criteria especially in a vertical hierarchy.

It doesn’t exactly matter what school you went to, or if you even went to school at all, especially in design. Is Stanford a good school because their education is superior, or because they only accept smarties who push themselves? Is Art Center good because they kick out everyone who can’t draw? Like everything else it’s the price you pay and the school’s brand-control. Here’s a little secret, Pasadena Community College (PCC) has a good number of instructors who teach at both PCC and Art Center. The teachers love teaching, and so they do. The cost of an Art Center class is ~$3500 each, PCC is around $70 each. Are you telling me that an Art Center class is 50 times better than a class at PCC? Maybe the advanced classes might be better, but I don’t know about 50 times better. I suppose you’re paying for something else, and it’s certainly not a better education. What ever your education background might be, I’ll put my money down on your level of passion and gumption instead.

What I’d rather see instead of a top-down hierarchy is a description of the school’s focus and philosophy (which I’m going to hope is unique per region per cost bracket), then measure THAT against the student’s work. Then we can talk about whether that school is delivering on their promise and share that information with potential students. If it was an infographic map, it’d be a bunch of vin-diagrams with overlapping bubbles, not a top-down pyramid.

What’s the philosophy and focus of your school? What was the philosophy of your Alma mater?

Wednesday, September 8, 2010
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Designed Myth of a Four Year University

by Ko Nakatsu

College spreads your wings and then shoves you out of the nest into the working-world. You think you’re ready, so you enthusiastically pump your fists into the air, hum “I believe I can fly!”, and plummet towards the ground of the professional world. When you jump, you actually DO believe that you can fly. This belief, that spending your years at the university will make you a professional and an expert, started from day-one of your college education. It takes that entire time spent in a design education to get you to believe that this formulaic time spent in this system will make you real-world ready.

Universities tricks you with a few methods, but mainly with a leveling-up style of an education process. Like a video game, each year spent, levels you up for the final boss-level, where upon completion of that, earns you a medal. First year is a foundation and an introduction to the basics, once you pass that year, you’re onto a slightly more advanced topic, like research methods and concept development. As you level-up, you end up in your “final” year, the last level, where you’re ready for your senior projects and thesis. This final level signifies to you, there is nothing else to be learned, we have taught you everything you need to know, and here is your very expensive piece of paper. You believe this because they TELL you. They tell you, you are done, you have completed everything.

There’s a reason they have to get you to believe that four years is enough. The reason is so you shell out the $$$ and attend the school. Let’s say a movie didn’t promise you a beginning, a middle, and an end, and they only promised you the beginning. They’d have a lot harder time bringing people into the theaters. So universities promise you those three parts. The reality is, college is just the beginning. The first year isn’t the foundation, the entire four years is the foundation of your career. If you don’t realize that, this could lead to a few assumptions that could slow your development when you enter the professional world:

Don’t believe that: Classes in school were enough and that the learning can stop
You were given readings and articles on perspectives other than your own. No one pressures you to do so in the real world. You don’t HAVE to read any more design books, you don’t HAVE to experiment with new projects, you don’t HAVE to try methods that make you uncomfortable. You only have to read blogs that YOU like. But you should continue to read the other boring but important stuff and you should give yourself homework once in a while because your education isn’t done yet.

Don’t believe that: Your school projects is like real world projects.
Some school assignments include applied ethnography or a design survey. The budget is usually something around $0 to a $1000. I thought I knew what “design research” was until a handful of $400,000 quantitative studies and ethnography studies in multiple countries for $300,000 taught me otherwise. I’m not saying money buys you a quality report, because I’ve seen a good number of shitty ones, but I’m just sharing the scale difference between academic projects and real world projects. You may have learned the basic concept of a methodology, but keep your mind to how the application works.

Don’t believe that: Networking is important.
I’ve met a number of people who stopped learning and practicing and just concentrated on networking to get a job. They believe this because that’s what the professionals and teachers say to do. Networking is important and works well when you’re getting to know your peers at the same place in your careers. You can talk about similar interests and issues. Which means that when you’re starting out, your peers aren’t the ones doing the hiring, and the ones who are, don’t want to connect with you. Spend time on increasing what you can do and not rubbing elbows. It’s not who you know, it’s what you know.

Don’t believe that: Your final senior project is everything you know about design
Senior projects are done after three years of education under your belt. Which means that it’s not an accurate representation of what you actually learned in college. It’s actually a culmination of everything you’ve learned up to the end of junior year, put into application and explored. If you want a project piece in your hands to see what you’re truly capable of with your degree, do a project between your graduation and before you start your professional time. At the earliest, your final project should be done AFTER you graduate.

Dont believe that: Your graduation portfolio represents who you are as a designer.
It doesn’t and it shouldn’t. It’d be a shame to define what you want to do with design in the first four years in the field. There’s so much great aspects of design to explore. You should experiment for the next six. Keep searching for what you want to do and craft your body of work (every month or so) for the next few years after you graduate.

Tuesday, September 7, 2010
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Process is in the Details: Dating is the Opposite of Interviewing for a Job

by Ko Nakatsu

The process for interviewing for a job is similar to the dating process. Generally, it goes something like this:
Step 1: Find someone you want to date (find a place where you want to work)
Step 2 (optional): Find someone that might know her (find someone that might know someone who works there)
Step 3: Ask them out (apply for the job)
Step 4: Go on the date (go on the interview)
Step 5: Get rejected (… get rejected)

The process may be similar, but the details of how you should conduct yourself are completely different. Interview behavior and dating behavior are exactly the opposite:

Her rejection goes “don’t ever call me” and that’s final.
Businesses rejection says “not now, but better luck next time”. Next time!? Yes. There can always be a next time.

If you call all the time to ask her out, you’re a “stalker”.
If you call a company all the time, they call that “persistence”, they call that “following-up”. Just be courteous.

If you hit on her and then hit on her friend, and then hit on her friend’s friend, you’re desperate.
In business, they call that networking.

If you date her and then date her friend the day after the break up, you’re a jerk.
If you work at a company and then work at a subsidiary, you can work for both places at the same time.

If she dumps you and you’re no longer in a relationship, you might get a bucket full of drama without any benefits.
If your company dumps you, you might be unemployed but you get zero drama and a bucketful of benefits.

When going to a restaurant and the bill comes she won’t even look at the check, you’ll pay.
When you eat out with business, they always get the bill.

During a date you may want to flirt, touch, hold hands.
Do not, under any circumstance, run your fingers on the back of your interviewer’s hand.

Never talk about your past on a date.
Most of your conversations is about your past on an interview.

Powerpoint on a date. WTF.
Powerpoint in an interview. Ooooh, impressive.

Asking your date if she’s willing to make physical augmentations, like a boob-job, will get you a slap in the face.
Asking your employer if they’re willing to make physical changes to your work-area is something to ask before you start.

At the end of a date, you’ll know where you stand, you may get a kiss, a hug, or a handshake, to gauge how it went.
At the end of an interview, good or bad, you won’t know how it went, it’s always the same “Thanks and we’ll get back to you”.

Sunday, September 5, 2010
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The Era of Post-Pop: No Such Thing As a Has-Been

by Ko Nakatsu

My friend listens to a very niche type of music, I call it “Post-Pop”. Post-pop bands are a re-undergrounding of what once was. The sunken Atlantis. One-hit-wonders like Chumbawamba, Bare Naked Ladies, or Live had one famous album and then lost traction. My friend listens to their albums that was released after their famous one. The album released in their post-fame phase.

In the design world, one-hit-wonders are all the rage. You know who they are. Everyone is enamoured with the new, and we hear about one designer’s project in blogs and then never hear about them again. But don’t just wait to passively hear about them, keep your eye on them, pay attention to their Post-Pop status. With marketing and media-access by individuals, there’s no such thing as a has-been any more, only an always-willbe. The good designers keep evolving and changing, and will continue to produce, after that one-hit that got them noteriety. Don’t let the marketing and publicity world determine your media consumption.

In the music world, too often I hear “I like their old stuff better.” If musicians sounded like the same as the album before, they’re not evolving and growing. Stagnation will define you as a one-hit-wonder, so evolve and grow so you can be a first-hit-wonder. Focus hard on how to get to your Post-Pop days and not just your pop-pop days.

Sunday, September 5, 2010
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Frank Garrity Taught Me How to Be a Good Designer-Human

by Ko Nakatsu

The following are some lessons that Frank Garrity, who owned and ran Bally Design, taught me – how to have principles in the business of design.

When I was a freshman, I spent hours crafting a resume-package asking… begging to be considered as a design intern. I didn’t want to spend my summer in any other way. I mailed it to a total of 53 companies. 52 of them promptly ignored me or rejected me. Frank, he was open-minded and didn’t systematically reject things. Though he hadn’t hired an intern in over four years, he didn’t outright reject me. He politely said “we haven’t decided to hire an intern this summer”. So I called every week after that, expressing my interest, offering ideas on how I can help. Frank Garrity of Bally Design gave me a chance that summer and hired me. I interned there in the summer of ’01 and ’02. Keep an open mind and give people a chance, regardless of experience. Listen to their story and then decide.

It was my first week, and in my hand was a $20,000 check from a client. It needed to be deposited and everyone was busy working on an RFP. He asked me to take it to the bank and despot it. When you’re a student, $20,000, in your hand, is inconceivable, and he trusted me with it. It empowered me for the rest of the summer. Show trust from the very beginning, and you’ll get it back a hundred fold.

Times were tough after 9-11 and the job market siezed, but Frank still hired me and paid me a good pay. I told him I’d work for free, after all, it was a coveted design internship. I would’ve paid to work with the Oxo and former IDEO designers. In the highly competitive industry, it’s an all-too-common practice to offer unpaid internships. And I told him that, that I’d do this unpaid, but he replied in his soft-spoken, as-a-matter-of-fact-way “You’re doing work. You should be paid”. Smiled. And that was that. Don’t take advantage of anyone. Pay people what they deserve.

There was an opportunity to do some military work. With the economy the way it was, military projects would bring in quite a bit of money to the company. Doing work for the military though would compromise some of the people’s beliefs. Especially Frank. If they didn’t design it, someone else would. He asked everyone how they felt. Did they want to do work for the military, or did they want to each take a paycut instead. They chose the paycut. You don’t have to sacrifice your values in the world of business. You still have a choice.

When a printer-vendor came in to present their capabilities, Frank sensed something. He asked him “Do you enjoy your job?” What a question to ask a total stranger! The truth was, the man hadn’t been enjoying his job, he wanted to be a graphic designer. They continued to talk in his office, and Frank hired him then and there. He came to Bally and created wonderful museum exhibitions. If you see someone not enjoying anything, help them find something they do.

He passed away a few years after my internship. I didn’t even know he was sick. The only way for me to pay him back now is to pay it forward. Do things as he did. I wish I could’ve gotten to know him better, have coffee with him, get to know his other philosophies and ideas. Maybe I’ll contact Alex Bally who ran the firm before him. Maybe I’ll cross paths with his daughters some day. Maybe they can share stories like the ones I shared here.

I thought I’d learn how to be a good designer that summer, but I learned how to be a good human in the design-world instead.

Friday, September 3, 2010
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Go Ahead Sk8rboi, Wear Those Skaterpants to Interviews

by Ko Nakatsu

I wore a pair of khaki skaterpants to my first internship interview. Skater-pants, let me remind you, were a popular pair of pants in the late 90’s. They were like bellbottoms, except instead of just flaring out at the bottom, they kind of… kept flaring upwards to the waist. Disco had bellbottoms, Hiphop had hammer pants, pop-punk had skaterpants. So unfashionable-me wore them into the new millenium and also wore them into my internship interview because someone told me “you should be yourself”.

At the time I was still trying to discover this “yourself”. Was it defined by my peers’ opinions, my background, my self-expression, or was it through my beliefs? There was one tiny bit of certainty in the definition and it was that “it’s what’s inside that counts”. That meant that if I’m going to be hired, I wanted to be hired for me, not by how I look, dress, or act. I had no regard for professionalism, authorities, or rules. It was the punk rock way. Which is why I had to wear skaterpants.

I walked into my scheduled time and sat with the director of design in a conference room with a large table and some chairs. I presented my projects, in all of its shiny freshman glory. Okay, they weren’t really “projects” but more like exercises. The “interview” was more of a polite conversation and a friendly critique, some tips and sage-advice that was too soon for me to understand.

Thirty minutes later I pushed the chair back, and as I stood up to leave to thank him good bye, the baggy skater-pants caught the corner of the laminate on the table and as I continued to stand up, not realizing it was caught, ripppppppppped the laminate off the table, ending with a loud SNAP! Breaking the laminate right off. We both stared at the strip of wood gliding through the air and on to the floor. Without hesitation, I pointed to it and said “The first thing I’m gonna do if you hire me, is totally fix that!”.

He laughed.

I got the internship.

Friday, September 3, 2010
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Define Yourself, Before You Research and Design

by Ko Nakatsu

How can you know your users and customers if you don’t know yourself?
If you don’t first define yourself, your research analysis is just mistranslated data.

To design a solution for someone else means to truly understand who they are. But that’s impossible to do without knowing who you are, because only then can you relate to your user.

The more you seek the answer of who you are, the more complex you become.
As you change, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand yourself.
In this struggle arises the definition of the self.

Sometimes it takes a lifetime to get that answer. In your quest to define who you are, you’ll explore many facets of personalities and characters. This lifetime pursuit is what will connect you with everyone around you. For most people though, your definition of the self, is most likely who you think you are. Who you think you are is often in misstep with who you actually are.

What it takes to truly define yourself:
It takes a complete release of your ego, so you can shape your definition of the true self.
It takes an extensive list of patterns of who you are not.
It takes a deeper understanding and observance of the world to relate yourself.
It takes a third party view to overcome delusions.
It takes a conscious effort to observe the part of you that never changes and will never change.

A clear articulation of who you are will help you understand others. The practice alone will get you closer. At which point you can design for their motivations, needs and desires that we so often talk about. Eventually your designed objects will be integral to their path in life.

Thursday, September 2, 2010
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How I Learned to be a Design Professional from James Bond

by Ko Nakatsu

Being “A Professional” is a state of mind, a way of life.
To act “Professional” is just a behavior, a facade.

Being “A Professional” is a deliberate everyday practice of your inner pursuit to achieve perfection, from how you fill your cup of coffee to how you present your design to your colleagues. It takes you to the top of your own game, hence, a Pro.
It’s easy to act “Professional”. It’s just a predefined set of actions mostly one of politeness and fake laughter in the world of small-talk. The daily rituals of business life, of clean pressed collar, cufflinks, buzzwords, and amicable demeanor does not make you a professional.

Seth Godin explains a professional as “Someone who costs a lot but is worth more than they charge. Someone who shows up even when she doesn’t feel like it. Someone who stands behind her work, gets better over time and is quite serious indeed about the transaction.”

My favorite Design Professional is James Bond. James Bond is A muffuggin’ Professional. I tried to get inside of James Bond’s head and to dissect what makes him A Professional. It’s his conviction on how to conduct himself whether in public or private and how he has designed his actions to reflect those inner beliefs. The following list is a list of some ways he would conduct himself as A Professional:
He knows everyone from the bellhop to the Boss.
He can get anything because he knows the ins and outs
He is like a chameleon, blending in when he needs to, or stands out to be noticed
He is charming yet deadly
He does everything with a purpose
He has the ability to react in any situation with the power of creativity
He doesn’t quibble on insignificant issues so he never thinks about “getting my money’s worth”
He’s an expert in soft skills
He doesn’t fill his coffee all the way to the top. He would plan and minimizes the risk of spillage
He never gets lonely because he has no time for such feelings
He is never lazy because he’s always working towards a goal
He doesn’t do anything FOR others. He does it because he HAS to. He does it because it is the RIGHT thing to do.
He has a smooth response to everything, because he’s already done it before, a thousand times.
He doesn’t drink beer because it makes you burp. Burping breaks the flow of thought, of action, of time.
He has no ego because that could cloud his judgment
He is witty, not humourous
He is attentive because he pays attention to details

With the state of being A Professional, you earn prestige, honor, and respect. It’s not actions that defines a man but a way of life.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010
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