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January 8, 2019 - January 6, 2025
Third, specialized environments or “culture labs” are being set up for grassroots creating that share deep commonalities with those that appear in my stories of towering creators today. These culture labs help lifelong creators learn and retain the “intuitive and deductive,” “imaginative and analytical,” “art and science” capacities of the da Vincis of our era. By pursuing the third way of creating, deeply committed artists, scientists, chefs, entrepreneurs, designers, and others hone emotive and cognitive states that promote frontier survival. These states are precisely those that grassroots
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fast creation, the prominent innovation model of today,
Whatever we create to optimize new communication and make sustainable a massively connected global human society will not principally be meeting needs that went previously unmet but will be addressing needs in new ways. If they are to be massively adopted, they will need to attract us by their beauty.
Creating what matters and has not existed before starts with what matters to us. We don’t create, or we do so very poorly, by coercion. We create because we feel like it.
culture labs remove obstacles to change.
Pitches,
express a creative idea that has never been imagined before, whose utility is impossible to know.
aesthetic empathy
the Creator’s Cycle of ideating, experimenting, and expressing.
In the full course of creating things that matter, the first phase of creating is a relatively rapid iteration of the Creator’s Cycle. Passionate curiosity generates inspiration and new ideas, and drives the hard work of getting others to buy into those ideas, while empathy helps creators listen well and, through collaboration, to adapt their ideas in ways that promote created things mattering more broadly.
Universal ideas, in Hillis’s view (such as the wheel, the computer, or wind instruments), belong in the public domain. They come to humanity in a moment and in a condition that human history has shaped; they are frequently expressed by many and are far more useful than any one person can possibly imagine. It is when you realize your idea in a particular way that matters to many others that you merit a patent.
The Imagineers had ten useful storytelling rules.
Tell a story that begs to be retold.
“Inventions are like this. First ten thousand people have an idea. Then a thousand actually try to make it. A hundred get something that almost works. Ten get the idea to work. And one manages to bring it to the world. We call that one the inventor.”
Nobody exactly asked for the Clock of the Long Now. It does not solve a problem and will not obviously help the economy, and yet the Clock obviously matters to many
First, creators make things they want with few expectations of how valuable these things might turn out to be. What they will do next is entirely dependent on what they discover from these new things they have created. Second, they are stubbornly attentive and learn with fresh eyes. Finally, they express what they discover, thrillingly, as if nobody has made anything like what they have just made.
truth, compassion, and courage.
every moral value could be built from these three.
With improvisation, idea development resembles playing a game in which the idea, or the point of concentration, is a kind of ball. We play ball.
paying attention to what others care about and giving them what they never imagined.
Aesthetic intelligence and obsessive attention to detail help make the ball game possible.
Oxman was not ready to stop creating before the sustainable future she envisioned came to pass. It didn’t matter how long it took. She was living in a rented apartment and traveling nonstop. Why did she need to live like this? She actually asked the question aloud and finally left the lecture room with my students awaiting an answer.
The implication was that her work mattered more than she did, or in a way it was her.
The goal of the class was to imagine creating something that eventually changed how people thought and lived and to pioneer the path to get there.
Mostly I worked with my students to help them overcome a hesitation to take the very first step of the Creator’s Cycle—to dream with passionate curiosity.
Their classical education had prepared them for established careers, like those in finance, management consulting, and medicine, not an open-ended path of uncertainty and risk.
If there is a common experience of living today on the planet, it might best be characterized not by political, religious, or social viewpoint, but by the simple act of creating for expressive purpose. Does it matter?
“Success was about vision,” he says, “about knowing how to dream up a story, tell it convincingly, and figure out how to make it come true. It was like writing a great book.”
The artists slipped on their shirts, which instantly changed them from a collection of individual artists with different points of view to a single creative unit.
“Leadership is not about telling people what to do,” Vesery said to me a few years later after we had hosted a similar experience with my own students, but “helping people reach a common decision.”
Absenteeism, estimated to cost the US economy around $150 billion, is nowhere near as concerning as presenteeism (showing up at work when personal circumstances prevent productive engagement), estimated today to cost US productivity over $1.5 trillion annually.
Aspirational culture labs encourage the “translation” or movement of created things from the lab into society. To make this possible, they provide some organizational structure, funding, and connections to commercial and cultural centers outside the labs. Through frequent public engagement, they help us realize dreams. They can be any organization—company, nonprofit, academic lab, even government—and have an unmistakable altruism.
an intention to explore, with the public, science through art and design.
As creators, we all need a Florence.
“We live at a time of unprecedented intellectual freedom and discovery. But you can’t discover the future fearing the harm exploration might bring. There’s no guarantee that any frontier will produce a useful discovery, but if the risk of discovery extinguishes the drive to pioneer, we’re already doomed.” After a pause, Skalak added, as if by afterthought, “Obviously, we all need water, and we all need food. But without hope, we have nothing.”
Our students should be creating such fresh experience and eventually following it to creative careers.”
