You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Design+Creativity’ category.
Where do you go for creative inspiration? For me, one place is the sea. It offers extraordinary details if you’re patient and curious enough to let them wash over you. The sea reminds me that the most beautiful forms are the most simple and direct. Too often, we complicate things by seeking out lofty solutions. Most of the time, the answer is sitting right there just waiting to be noticed.
………………
“The sea does not reward those who are too anxious,
too greedy, or too impatient. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach—
waiting for a gift from the sea.“
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
And you? Where do you go? The museum? The shower? A bike ride?
A wave of admonishment ran through the design world recently when the Department of the Interior (DOI) used a popular design crowdsourcing site to solicit ideas for a new logo. (You can read petitions and arguments here and here.)
It raises the hackles of designers when high-profile organizations (last year it was the National Endowment for the Arts) use the design equivalent of trolling—capturing everything in its indiscriminate net for very little investment.
There are a number of unsavory aspects to this practice, but most importantly, the client doesn’t benefit.
It is a terrible waste of time for a company.
Even though I wanted to ogle the submitted design work, my head spun to take in all those solutions (600+), many of which were inappropriate or just plain bad. There is much to say even about the creative brief submitted by DOI, but I’m focusing here on the cost to the organization.
Faced with too many choices, we reach an overload and we fail to make good choices.
Many books have been written on the subject of choice and decisionmaking, and there is science that supports the conclusions about the impact of too many choices. Armed with a little bit of knowledge from some of these books, we can all make better choices and decisions (see list at end of post).
In his book, Paradox of Choice (affiliate link), author Barry Schwartz talks about the pitfalls of too much choice. (You can also watch his TED talk on the same subject.)
“All of this choice has two effects on people. It produces paralysis rather than liberation. The second effect is that even if we manage to overcome paralysis and make a choice, we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would be if we’d had fewer options to choose from.”
The fallout from these two key effects of the staggering choices in today’s world manifests itself in more ways. There is an inherently lower satisfaction level which causes us to regret our choice more. It makes us imagine that there had probably been a better choice. And this regret makes us even more dissatisfied.
More options also creates higher expectations, simply because of the sheer number of choices. Faced with many options, we’re convinced we can pick the best one. The final blow to our happiness in our choice when we have many options, as opposed to fewer, is that we tend to blame ourselves for our lousy choice.
Suddenly, your job, which was probably already taxing just got taxed further.
One of the reasons Trader Joe’s is so successful and popular is that they limit the choices. They are aware of how a mindboggling array of choices affects our ability to choose and be satisfied. Think about the last time you stared openmouthed at the cat food or cereal shelf of a grocery store. You sigh, your shoulders sink and you tire just thinking about making a choice. There is a cognitive cost exacted with this type of decision.
……………
In the case of a crowdsourced logo, many organizations lured by almost free and hundreds of choices don’t take into account the massive cost of staff time to adequately evaluate the choices. The money they imagine they are saving will get spent on staff time probably better spent another way. Factor in the time lost on confusion and second guessing, and the cost is even higher. Now, instead of evaluating a few very solid solutions based on a really useful brief, you’re navigating through too many wrong solutions that make choosing harder.
This is why crowdsourcing design is fundamentally flawed. All the focus is on the form of the thing (its looks). Form is important. But the form is only a small part of an effective identity—strategy, appropriateness, uniqueness, flexibility, lasting power.
These same theories apply not just to crowdsourcing design work but also to soliciting too many bids (unless there is a requirement to do so).
It’s something to consider if your staff is already wearing too many hats, you’re concerned about cost (in a broad sense), you reputation to protect, and most of all, you want the quality of the output to match the level of the work you do.
There are two ways good ways to avoid all this. One is to be very clear about your goals, purpose, tone/personality, audience, uses and needs. And the second is to sharpen your skills and confidence in selecting and evaluating the right designer (or design team).
……………
Have you ever used a crowdsourcing site for design? Do you know anyone who has? If you’re willing to share your experiences, please do. There’s very little out there on what happens next.
……………
Books on decisionnmaking and choices
These are all excellent books on making both personal and business decisions. They cite similar studies but each book’s focus is slightly different. (These are affiliate links.)
The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar
Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz
How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer
Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
…………….
{Above: Creative commons image from “flickr/iamdonte”}
When a friend asked if I was interested in taking a tour of Bob’s Red Mill on a Monday, I decided I could make it a “work-related” event. The boss (that would be me) is a stickler for purposeful hookey. I do write and design a bit about food, especially of the local variety. But Bob needs no promotion from me since his product is sold by every grocery store chain in the U.S. of A.
So I was glad to find some visual treats, like this wall of grain sacks. Read the rest of this entry »
This month marks the final installment of a “Year of Produce” in which I charted my fresh produce purchases in illustrated form for a year starting in April 2010. I was curious to see if I put my money where my mouth is about eating locally and, by definition, seasonally. Yes, 2010 was so last year. But April is so now! Which means you can start all over again if you missed the whole thing. Scroll down for March as well as a mini image of each month that links to that month’s post. Each one has some combination of recipes or recipe links, preparation ideas, thoughts on eating locally and other good stuff. So please explore!
With this final post I offer:
• A tally for the year
• Thoughts on what is local
• My observations on the project
• March recipe links
• How to eat seasonally, affordably (prompted by a question someone asked me) Read the rest of this entry »
At left is my new Meyer lemon tree that I purchased from Graceful Blades (no website) who lovingly grows fruit trees and will be at the next Hillsdale Farmers Market Sunday, March 20, weather permitting. A cheery gift to myself in these dark months.
I wonder if there’s an equivalent phrase like drunk dialing, as it relates to writing blog posts in a weird frame of mind. No, I’m not drunk. Just fried. And why am I posting then? Well, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, “Sometimes you have to go into a blog post, not with the content you want, but the content you have.”
And to quote a former boss, “Done is beautiful.”
This being my my second-to-last produce log for this yearlong project, I had visions of waxing culinarily about the secret joys of eating in winter and the anticipation of freshly cut asparagus around the corner. All lovely stuff. All stuff I have no energy for. This is instructive. I can write a rather long post about what’s top of mind—rush projects, little breathing room to collect oneself or allow for margins of error, the dissatisfaction of churning out work too quickly.
Writing about the nourishing and writing about the sapping both require effort. But each requires a different kind of effort. And to honor the former requires a shifting of gears, a collecting of oneself, allowing oneself to go deeper into a place that isn’t easily accessed when you’re working like a flurry of restless gnats. At a recent coastal writing retreat, one attendee said that she was telling her father how hard it was for her to relax when the opportunity to relax was there. He would always remind her that you can’t go from 60 to zero at the snap of your fingers. Read the rest of this entry »
Photos from my archive. Enjoy.
One benefit of neglecting your garden, especially in winter, is that you might find a surprise if you bother to visit it—such as this lovely rose-like head of chicory (radicchio). I left it alone rather than harvest leaves for salads so I could grow a whole head. Torrential downpours followed by an extended cold snap all but destroyed the plants.
Then, a warm dry(ish) day lured me into the garden, which I had been avoiding because I have yet to remove the last of the tomato plants! The chicory bounced back with splashes of fuschia painted on the leaves. I also discovered so many scallions, I had to force some onto a friend.
This variety—Castelfranco variegata—hails from the Veneto region in northern Italy. There’s a ghostly white variety, too. Its flavor is enhanced by cold weather, like many hearty winter greens. You can buy seeds from Nichol’s, a local Oregon nursery but they’re currently sold out. Who knew it was so popular? Read the rest of this entry »
Clobber or feed them? I say feed.
As I started writing this, election coverage murmured on the laptop in the kitchen, while the smell of bacon, vinegar and brown sugar filled the apartment. Collard greens. Election results weren’t sounding good, rekindling the helplessness I’d felt in earlier elections.
What does this have to do with October’s produce? It’s easy to confuse what you can and can’t control in life. You can care deeply about certain issues and not be able to fix them. But that doesn’t stop us from losing sleep and feeling frustrated. I discovered at some point with elections that I actively allowed my energy to be consumed by what I had no control over. Pure laziness designed to appear as though I was an active and engaged citizen. These are places where we often hide, like excess TV watching, ensuring that we’ll keep avoiding what really feeds us—bodily and mentally.
chanterelle
Taking a break from brainstorming on a new project, I drive to the coast on an unusually warm, sunny October day. I should sit at my computer and meander down the various paths of discovery to solve this design problem. But this is a day to be seized, and one with a different path to meander.
Mushroom hunting, like idea hunting, requires a kind of intuitive search. You don’t know exactly where to look or what you’ll find when you get there, wherever there is. A little more certainty exists in the end result with mushrooms than with creative concepts. Or at least there should be, especially if you plan to eat what you find. Guide books help you identify the unique features of each type of mushroom. Even so, there can still be a shred of doubt, perhaps necessary for self-preservation, as you contemplate a meal using your wild forage. But even with ideas, there is the ah-ha moment, that sense that you’ve stumbled onto just the thing you didn’t know you were looking for. There’s a rightness, as if the solution were under your foot the whole time.
One thing about a regular, and more importantly, self-directed, non-client-based project, is that life sometimes gets in the way of getting it done. Life, in this case, was cross-country travel, getting walloped by a flu while on travel and attempting to steal moments to get this month’s produce log designed and posted. A laptop with a mouse pad next to it (I have trouble with a track pad for detailed work) does not fit on cramped airplane tray table.
Download September Fresh Eat log in high-resolution. Below are links to previous month’s logs.
Why Eating Healthily Can Be a Challenge
Life gets in the way of a lot of things while we’re living it. Eating is one of them. Or eating well, as in healthily, not fancily. In a recent New York Times article “Even Benefits Don’t Tempt Us to Vegetables,” the author reminds us what a serving is: half a cup of cut-up or cooked vegetables, one cup of fresh greens, half a cup of cooked dried beans, or, if you must, six ounces of vegetable juice.
