Design, Drive It Like You Stole It

Curt Cloninger's panel yesterday entitled "Hot-Wiring the Creative Process: Drive It Like You Stole It" was the most personally rousing design related advice I've heard in a long time. It was mostly stuff that I've heard or practiced at different times over the years but the passion and intelligence with which Cloninger delivered it was really invigorating. Here are my mostly unaltered notes that I gleefully speed typed yesterday:

How To Hot-Wire the Creative Process: Drive It Like You Stole It - Curt Cloninger

generic design process:
pre-design
design
development
implementation

this process should be supplemented by:
Strategies
Tools
Habits
Paradigms

Strategies
Assume you can do it. (Fake it till you make it).
Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies
Don't pursue eureka, always pursue a solution
overpursue the conceptual
"A good concept poorly executed is more compelling than a bad concept well-executed."
Blitz (Stefan Sagmeister)
Plunder Art History (Pre-Bauhaus) *Tarbell

Designer as editor -no one makes anything from scratch, you are an editor more than an author
Heads up as you tweak
Don't just harvest "Final Solutions" - develop ideas, components, concepts methodologies, not just finalized projects
Create & Evaluate in turn - make time for both creation and evaluation, keep them separate.

Tools
use auto-generative software for ideation & experimentation:
n_gen
designershock
Muller-Brockmann's raster systemische as an analog auto-generative tool
make your own generative tools (Joshua Davis)

Use standard software in non-standard ways:
tweak unfamiliar software (carson, mike young)
Tweak Obsolete software (Beck's Black Tambourine)
Do unfamiliar things with familiar software

habits
maintain a playground
everybody needs a place to fail
fail semi-publicly
test pilot collective
UPSO
oculart

be less derivitive (media fast, control the amount of cultural input you are receiving)
be hyper-derivative (the opposite)

Balance the 5 layers of design context:
1. General Aesthetics
2. Media Constraints (yield/fight)
3. audience needs
4. clinet needs
5. ethical considerations

Great Designers hot-wire the process
don't be afraid to do whatever it takes to design

Here's his actual presentation.

Comments

[oscar]

So is that like hacking code? In that case, I'm great at this stuff, hehe! I'm all about the cut n paste.