An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth (reprinted)

I found this on another blog, and traced it back to its origin here.

I think there are some great insights here, which is why I'm reprinting it. But I plan to post my own Creative Roadmap sometime soon.

Incomplete Manifesto for Growth

Written in 1998, the Incomplete Manifesto is an articulation of statements exemplifying Bruce Mau’s beliefs, strategies and motivations. Collectively, they are how we approach every project.

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.

PowerPoint Training (5 of 5): 10 Steps to Presentations without Hesitation

Presenting can be difficult. Any PowerPoint product is made stronger through the addition of tips to the presenter, to help him or her feel more comfortable in presenting. Here are some highlighting some tips and techniques I recommend for the new presenter to help him or her present more effectively.

1. Stay mobile. Moving around helps keep people attention focussed, and actively participating. This is especially important for
younger audiences

2. Make eye contact. This is the best tool for maintaining a personal connection with each participant.

3. Be enthusiastic. Show your interest in the subject and passion for the communication and the energy will communicate.

4. Connect conversationally with your audience. The presentation is just like a conversation, not a speech. Encourage the presenter to talk using the points in the slide, but not just reading the points in the slide. Don’t use a script, as much as a rough outline from which you can extrapolate conversationally.

5. Rehearse. Once the presenter knows what she wants to say, she should practice in real time, out loud, not just in her head. This helps you to be aware of the time, and avoid elements that can trip you up.

6. Know the material. This should be encouragement to read through the TE and become familiar with the specific topic.

7. Encourage response. Allowing for times when the presentation can become a conversation can loosen everyone up.
Get equipment early and set up early.

8. Make sure everyone can see the screen, and that the presenter can see everyone.

9. Make it real. Relate the topic to specifics will make it more interesting for Participant and Presenter.

10. Be flexible. Once you;ve rehearsed and rehearsed and got the presentation down, be ready with a couple of planned “stalls.” These will help you in case of the presentation being delayed, or equipment failure in mid-stream, or the presentation going much shorter than you anticipated. Small canned jokes about the subject matter, which presenters will typically start a presentation with, can also be useful in pocket to pull out at these awkward junctures.

PowerPoint Training (4 of 5): Seven goals in creating an effective presentation.

1. Make it readable
Point size must be readable for the proposed space. If an individual is to view the presentation on a computer screen in front of him, it need not be as large as a show intended to be viewed from the back row of an auditorium. If delivery can’t be determined, there are some good middle-ground standards.

2. Use visuals to focus attention
Images can be distracting, but also work to focus attention. Individuals (who read) will read the content in the first second or two. The presenter must then be relied on to hold the viewers attention on the screen, and on the content, while the extrapolation and detailed content delivery occurs. The right images can help keep the participant focussed on the screen, and thereby on the presentation.

3. Deliver content simply
Know the audience, and a delivery system that is best for them. While animations might be distracting for an older audience, for a younger audience it can be a tool to hold attention. Therefore it’s essential to know who the presentation is designed to reach.

4. Deliver content consistently
As mentioned, templates not only help with ease of building PowerPoint shows, but consistent delivery also helps with messaging.

5. Keep it simple
If the content starts building on a particular slide, question if it should be two slides. Remember that the attention given to an individual slide will wane. The longer that slide is up on the screen, the more participants will look away, and become distracted. But put a new slide on the screen, and the attention of the participants can be likewise refreshed. Avoid having to linger for too long on any individual point on any individual slide, unless there are some elements that move on the screen, and thereby “refresh” the audiences attention.

6. Make it memorable
There are 3 keys to making a compelling, memorable slide:
• Use only 3-7 words
• Use active verbs (ideally start with an active verb)
• Keep the slide focused.

7. Keep the show short
The flip side to breaking out slides is to not have too many slides. One way to help with this is to compartmentalize a large presentation into sections, and provide an agenda at the start. One really great graphic method of helping viewers determine where they are in the paradigm of the presentation is to provide a little navigation bar, at the bottom or the side of the slide, providing wayfinding orientation, much like a website. But as important as it is to let the participant know where he/she is in the presentation, it's also important that they not get lost along the way, in too many slides.

PowerPoint Training (3 of 5): Six Reasons to use a PowerPoint Template and a Slide Library

1. Consistent delivery. PowerPoint is all about consistency, and tools to help enforce consistency, as a tool for focusing content. This allows for delivery of information, within definable and organized parameters.

2. Templates allow you to take advantage of a Pre-Built Slide Library.
A library of slides is an invaluable creation tool. The more Slide Types that can be identified up front, the more streamlined the creation process can become.

3. Templates with a Slide library add Drag and drop slide functionality.
With templates built to the same design allows simple drag-and-drop functionality within the formatted slides that would not be available for slides pulled from templates outside of the RHB template.

4. Easy production of a lesson from scratch.
All of these elements combine to create a workflow that makes it easy to set up a consistent lesson. This is especially true if you are creating a product with multiple PowerPoint presentations, or developing a sales force who need to deliver multiple different presentations on different aspects of a large product line.

5. Slides can be created with Pre-built functionality.
The animations and functionality can be built right in. Complicated animations and reveals can be built once, then repurposed. This amortizes the cost of creating complex (and often very interesting) slides,which makes for better presentations.

6. Creates, over time, a reduction of work.
Again, the more slides you make from scratch, the more you can add to your library. The bigger your library, the fewer slides you need to create from scratch later on. Again to use the example of a sales force, if a salesman builds a new slide for a new product, (or more likely has a staff designer with PowerPoint savvy do so) then that slide can be easily added to a library that can be distributed to all of the sales force. Such a library is easily updated, small and therefore easily (digitally) portable, and distributable.

The Point of PowerPoint (2 of 5): Building design consistency

The first big time-saver is to build a usable, and re-usable, template.

If produce one of something, it’s unique. If you produce two, it’s a pair, but not necessarily a consistency. Make three or more of something, and you’ve begun to define consistency, and that's the core of good design. People like consistency, and it’s what PowerPoint was designed for. So, in order to build a solid template, you have to have enough of a volume of the types of slides you'll typically see in order to solidly develop consistency.

A great start toward establishing consistency between more than one PowerPoint presentation, and thereby developing or promoting an identity, is to build a reusable template. A good template can save hours of work, and consistent use of a template facilitates reuse of slides from a slide library.

Consistency in a presentation allows the participant to focus on the content, because the framework for that content is a consistent “box”— a frame that provides context, but by remaining the same, does not call attention to itself. This familiar framework offers a lot of benefits—but first I should address the dangers.

The templates which come standard with PowerPoint most often feel like they were designed by Mondrian, if Mondrian was a colorblind dyslexic. As a result, many “out of the box” PowerPoint presentations are garish, and poorly designed in terms of color selection, based entirely on the template. And as a result, there is a thriving business in the selling of PowerPoint backgrounds, for those without the savvy to create one on their own, with any image manipulation software. But even then, the ability to create a background doesn’t infer the design ability to create an effective one. I’ll get into that in one of the future installments.

With the design issues in mind, once you have an attractive and effective identity created, in the form of a n attractive and workable background, there are still other elements to apply, toward consistency. PowerPoint templates consist of a Master Slide, which have Master Slide styles (including footer styles) , and Notes Page Styles. Using these elements regularly and in the same manner, and using templates that share the same characteristics as a “set,” can help ensure 3 things:

• Consistent placement
Text elements in terms of font choice, hierarchy and placement can be set on a Master Page in the PowerPoint document.

• Consistent identity
Master pages can be set up with text sizes and image placements that assure consistent identity. This includes color and specialized graphic effects beyond the standard templates Microsoft packages with the program. Using the Master Page consistently and exclusively assures that the identity will be consistent.

• Ease of use
A properly built template is easy to create new slides in. This allows the writer to focus on the content, and not the formatting. Of course, the key to this is to have prebuilt formatting in the template that covers 80-90% of the writer’s content needs.

And you’re on your way.

The Point of PowerPoint (1 of 5): Thinking before Inking.

“Think before you ink” is an old expression I picked up in my comic book days, speaking to the fact that a good comic book inker had to be a strong artist, not just a “tracer of pencil lines.” A good inker thinks before he inks, and knows the marks he needs to make in order to make an effective product. And like so many things in comics, that’s an analogy for almost anything. Before a presenter starts building a presentation, essentially putting ink to paper, the thinking needs to be there.

And that thinking needs to answer 2 core questions.

What is the Point?
The “point” of a PowerPoint show is to communicate information. To do this you need to follow some simple rules for visual presentation. You need to build your show with:
• Clear readability
• Clear communication
• Ease of use (and not over-use)


What is the Focus?
The “focus” of a PowerPoint is different from the point, for our purposes. For this, we’ll define the focus as “what do you want the participant to walk away from this with?” There is a specific point to each slide, and to the presentation as a whole. To keep the focus clear, you need to be sure that you:

• Keep the viewers attention. It’s inevitable that in a presentation attention will wander. Viewers of all ages look to understand what the point is, but if the feel they’ve gotten it, their attention will wander. If you hand out a printout of all the slides in a presentation, inevitably there will come a point in each and every slide when the audience member with this in hand, will look to see what the next slide is, even though the speaker hasn’t finished speaking on the current slide. This is a signal that the participant feels he or she has gleaned the point, and is anxious to move on to the next point. This is an area where (when not overdone) animation and imagery can help—in keeping the participant focussed on the slide, and thereby glean more from the content.

• Don’t overwrite the slide. If a slide has several bullets, consider making it two slides. According to a study by the US Navy, the average adults attention span is 18 minutes. Ideally for a PowerPoint presentation, that would be broken down into chunks of about 2-4 minutes per slide. If a slide is overwritten or takes longer than 5 minutes, you can count on having lost your audience’s attention at some point in there.

• Plan the content as more than what is read. Content should introduce the idea, and allow the speaker to extrapolate, or you lose the participant’s attention. The participant can read faster than the presenter can talk. If the speaker is merely reading what is on the screen, and adding nothing, you're going to have a room full of bored participants. You'd have been better served emailing the presentation.

•Give the audience something to look at. I'm not talking about extra bells and whistles, or distracting images, or useless clip art. Give the audience images with impact, that point to, emphasize, and work with the content. A picture really is worth a thousand words, and in an environment where you don't want a thousand words, they are especially valuable. This is where my own area of experience comes in—in creating visuals that highlight the content in a dramatic way, and thereby creates an environment where the participant is more likely to get the point, and walk away with the point securely in pocket.

With those overarching goals, getting into the specifics of “how” can provide some shortcuts to making a PowerPoint presentation simple. effective, and attractive.

Observations on the Teen Demographic (Part 3 of 3): Talk with me, not at me: The importance of interactivity

Television and print media are traditionally “push” media; uni-directional with predefined “receiver” structures. In contrast to this, one of the major appeals of the internet is its ability to function in the same way with traditional “push” content, but also, more importantly to work interactively with viewers, and provide “pull” content. This interactive engagement of the viewer, getting the kids into acquiring information and directing the course of their learning, creates a sense of community and personal involvement. Kids tale part in gaining education, and in participating, value what they’ve gained.

A personal aside: I learned as a child one of the keys to a strong education is a perception of education as something you take, not something that is ”given” to you. That is, if you have a teacher that is un-engaging, and delivering material that is uninteresting in an “easy” class, it remains the responsibility of the student to try and dig something out of the hours spent in class. Especially in college, where every hour in class represents an investment of cash, I could never understand the glee in others eyes at a teacher not delivering, or, on occasion, not showing up. Sure, you get credit for the class. But you don’t get the value that the credit you paid for was supposed to represent. How can you image that you’re “getting over” by not having to have a class because the teacher doesn’t show? As a concept, it still blows my mind. But this is not a popular attitude, and one that’s difficult to spread. But the internet seems to be doing it quite well—if a site does not deliver, it does not get clicked-through, and opportunity for deeper diving and increased communication is lost.

But as the interactive communication offered on the internet becomes more popular, and even expected, it becomes difficult for traditional print media to echo, and complete. The interactivity can be mimicked to a certain extent in print publications through interactive activities like quizzes, discussion questions, and group activities. Notably, teen girl magazines are increasing their level of interactivity as well in this way; this will probably further escalate with the intense magazine competition that exists. Young male magazines such as Maxim also are following this paradigm.

In schools, there has been a shift from lecture-oriented teaching to cooperative work (broadcast model vs. interactive model), again allowing students to participate in knowledge acquisition. I myself am engaged in acquiring my Masters in Graphic Design through an online course, because of the flexibility it affords. This method of teaching is becoming more prevalent even in the least technologically savvy school districts. In an era where interactivity, cooperative learning and higher thinking skills are becoming so important, it’s a good idea to consider how we can possibly incorporate these teaching methods into publications and print as well.

Style of visual presentation can have a big effect on reader involvement. It’s a confirmation of the intuitive response that an anonymous author (one that just lists facts, describes things as happening to neither the author nor the reader directly) is much less appealing and involving for the reader than a “visible” author, one who creates an I-you relationship with the reader (as opposed to an I-it relationship). The bottom line is that the importance of talking to the reader, or more appropriately, engaging the reader in a conversation as part of the process, and really creating an engaging conversation, is becoming an essential part of assuring interactivity in print media. That is, talking to the reader, not at the reader, is a key, essential distinction—and one that is not easily achieved.