All projects: Gel, Jobs, Good Todo, Games, Uncle Mark, Blog, Bit Literacy
Artists break things (guest post by Seth Godin)
Seth Godin has the guest spot today on Good Experience. (You might also like Seth's extremely popular blog and his excellent-but-not-quite-as-well-known video of his talk at my Gel conference. I also contributed to the What Matters Now ebook.)
Seth writes:
Artists break things.
ThisisBroken.com was a great project where Mark and I (mostly Mark) highlighted systems, interfaces, signs and other stuff that was just plain broken. When the door says 'pull' and you need to push, or when the gift card makes it impossible to use up all the money or when you ask a blind person to read the screen... hey, it's broken.
But wait! It's easy to draw the wrong lesson from the pleasure we get in ridiculing things that are broken. While we revel in the fact that sometimes we get it wrong, that sometimes we make ridiculous and irritating errors, if I've somehow persuaded you that breaking things is a problem, then I apologize.
Because it's not.
If you conclude that what you ought to do is hew the trodden path and stick to the rules, you've missed the point. If you conclude that what you ought to do is hew the trodden path and stick to the rules, you've missed the point.
Real artists break things.
Artists aren't only painters. Artists are people who make change, people who touch others, people who create work that matters. If you design a new interface, you're an artist. If you create a story for a non-profit that spreads around the world and raises awareness and changes lives, you're an artist. If you look a kid in the eye and teach her algebra in a way she understands, you're an artist.
So why is it difficult to be an artist?
Because artists break things. Breaking the status quo, the established rules, the way things usually are.
And there is no manual. No rulebook. No guaranteed process to follow.
If there were, it wouldn't be art. It would be a proven process to generate results. It would be engineering in its simplest form. But it's not that, it's art.
And artists break things.
Sometimes you break things and keep them broken. The iPod broke the record business. It killed Tower and it also added dozens of steps for first-time users looking to listen to a song. The old method: turn on the radio. Or, visit a store, buy a CD and listen to it. The new method: buy a Mac. Buy an iPod. Get an internet connection. Figure out how to use the store. Install the cables... etc. etc. Broken!
Except not broken.
Not broken because the second time you listened to a song, it was better. A lot better.
And then the genius tool or Pandora or a podcast comes along and it's not a lot better, it's a whole new game.
That's what artists do. They don't actually break things. They invent tomorrow. Hurry, we need more of that.
- - -
Seth's upcoming book is called Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?. It's about art and gifts and breaking things.
See also the What Matters Now Seth organized and I contributed to.
(P.S. If you see something broken, take a picture and upload it to the This Is Broken photo pool on Flickr. -mh)
Or : "if you haven't tried and failed, you haven't really been trying".
I love my job, which is (mostly) to work with clients to challenge them to think about their business. Sometimes what they are doing is just fine, but it is rare that we don't together come up with at least a few insights that require them to change the status quo.
Definitely a cool job, but frustration does seep in where the client recognises the need to change, identifies the way to change.. yet then backs away from it for fear of change / failure.
I most recently blogged on the thought that Moore's Law now applies to innovation, so, for many businesses, they must definitely "adapt or die", as the status quo is certain death, sooner or later.
Time to start breaking things... only by breaking things can you find out what is going to work and what won't...
Then again there are still plenty of us out here who STILL haven't bought iPODs because it's still not easy enough on the first try and whatever's supposed to be so great about try # 2 doesn't outweigh how crappy my son's iPOD sounded when he hooked it up to my kick-ass custom-component stereo. I haven't even figured out how to hook up my scanner. And I'm pretty tech savvy, but the payoff isn't high enough--I'd use it twice per year, and I'd forget how to do it again by the second time. I have the latest software for my job and for what I like to do, but I have this old-fashioned stereo with components and stuff bec it actually does what I want it to, which is SOUND GOOD. Something the iPOD people totally fricking missed. Yeah. They broke it all right.
@Claudia I'd suggest reading Seth's blog for a while, maybe you'd get where he is coming from.
The iPod sounds 'good enough', but its what you can do with the music that is where it broke the rules and moved the audio experience forward. I love mine to listen to podcasts, something your stereo can't do. I can find *that song* on the fly and play it for my kids. I can listen to a book that is 10 CDs long without interruption. So yea, it broke things--it broke my world into a new experience that I wouldn't want to give up. Ever.
I totally want to go out and break something... and invent tomorrow: inspire people to live out of their hearts for love, relationships, business and creativity -now... where to start?
I'm always interested in people's definitions of art. Different people's definitions come from their personal histories and how they view life, which Seth has discussed plenty when he talks about lenses.
For that reason there will never be a definition of art that works for everyone, but Seth's sounds pretty good to me.
I draw storyboards. I'm lucky to solve storytelling problems for people AND strive to render the results in an artistically pleasing way that is more traditionally defined.
Does that make me half artist (problem solver) and half hack (delivering the solutions in a stylistically 'derivative' set of drawings)?
Not sure, but I find my work is artistically satisfying in two different ways.
Maybe it wouldn't hurt me to think about other ways to present the solutions?
My favorite definitions of art always include an inspirational component, which Seth's does very nicely too.
this reminds me of a quote by picasso: "Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction"