The Human Imperative to Design
Imagination + Creativity + Narrative = Design
Some time ago, I was skimming through articles about innovation as research for a talk about how designers appear to be able to innovate on demand, and happened on an article by Louise Beaumont, global banking executive and fintech futurist, called “Let’s Talk Imagination, Not Innovation.” In it, she states,
The daunting thing about the future is that nobody has defined it; there’s no frame of reference, so the default setting is that many describe the future in terms that resemble the immediate past... [BankNXT, 2017]
Provocative, since designers are actually tasked with helping create the future – but are we really working without a frame of reference? Of course not. Beaumont is calling out her industry for a lack of innovation, but something about her broader assertion regarding a lack of framework got me wondering. As I dug into the topic, a number of things fell into place, so let’s start with imagination as the author suggests.
Imagination While we as Homo sapiens emerged some 300,000 years ago, something strange and hugely significant happened to us just 50,000 years ago, in a period some anthropologists refer to as the Cognitive Revolution, marking the beginning of the distinctive Upper Paleolithic era. With nothing in the fossil record to provide clues of any related morphological change, our ancestors suddenly began to demonstrate a powerful imagination, with artisans carving elaborate figurines of fantastic creatures that don’t exist in the real world. The implications are staggering; our ability to imagine things that don't exist and conjure them into artifact was not limited to objects of art.
Peoples of the Upper Paleolithic invented sewn clothing, portable lamps, and watercraft. They also designed heated shelters, fishing equipment, baking ovens, refrigerated storage pits, and artificial memory systems. Upper Paleolithic folk used rotary drills, shaped musical instruments, mixed chemical compounds, and constructed kilns to fire ceramics. [John F. Hoffecker, Evolutionary Anthropology 14:186 –198 (2005)]
All born from imagination. It’s no wonder then, that Albert Einstein himself proclaimed, “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.” It’s also why this is the first element of our so-called missing frame of reference.
Creativity The second element is creativity, the ability to marshall knowledge of disparate domains to bring forth novel integrations and solutions in another. As writer and illustrator Kayden Hines put it so eloquently on medium.com,
Creativity is about seeing the world in new ways, finding hidden patterns, making connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, and generating solutions. It is the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality.
If imagination gives us the What, creativity provides the How. In the context of design and innovation, they are symbiotic partners. Even the most gloriously imagined situation remains locked in our brains without our powers of creativity to bring it to life in our lived experiences. And while our imaginations are not constrained by any limits of our physical world, our creativity is planted squarely in the pragmatic, constantly looking for fresh integrations of existing elements to realize our imaginings.
Hines goes on to say, “In short, creativity is about connecting the dots. Creative people collect more dots, so they can connect them later.” In my experience, this assertion is spot on. One of my early mentors in design, the great Sara Little Turnbull, was an absolute master of this process. Consulting for 3M in the early 1970’s for example, Turnbull combined 3M’s non-woven fabric technology with ancient paper molding techniques used by local artisans she’d seen in her global travels to create, among other things, 3M’s ubiquitous dust mask. (Yes, the same mask whose N95 descendent we are now all too familiar with.) Sara implored young designers like me to “notice everything”, to mentally file away anything we’ve not seen before so our creativity would have access to it later. She also reminded us that curiosity fuels creativity; in order to notice anything we might otherwise miss, we need to cultivate a mood of curiosity, to be present in a state of wonderment, requiring intent, attention and training. It’s also useful to remember that the nemesis of curiosity is certainty. When we’re sure we have the answer, when we’re convinced we already know what’s up, we shut down our curiosity and starve our creativity.
Narrative If imagination and curiosity provide the What and How of design, respectively, narrative brings the Who, Where, When and Why. In other words, when we bring forth a new experience in the context of a story about someone’s concerns in a particular place and time, we move from expression and art into design. Narrative is the third element of our framework for defining the future.
While our affinity for narrative dates back to at least our Upper Paleolithic friends - picture the stunning storyboards they painted on cave walls - it wasn’t until the last century when the philosophical discourse took the bold step to assert that our relationship with narrative runs far deeper than creating stories to relate or explain things. We, in fact, “live in language”; we know no other reality than that which we experience through language. By extension, we make sense of our experiences by organizing in and around narratives. We are hardwired to create stories in our minds about what’s happening in order to respond appropriately. We can’t help but do so.
At the same time, much of what we imagine is about the future, and we construct narratives into the future as vessels for these imaginings so we can mull them over or share them with others. Ideally, we understand we are the authors of these future narratives and have the agency to choose among them. All too often, however, our perception of future narratives gives over to a surrender to the apparent reality of those stories, leaving us feeling trapped or powerless, especially when someone else has drafted the story.
Designers therefore carry the obligation to create and facilitate future narratives which instead promote hope and agency, empowering others to live better futures.
Design At its most fundamental level, Design is storytelling. The stories we craft are about future situations that we’ve imagined turning out in ways better than the status quo, harnessing our creativity to realize the products, interfaces, spaces and other forms of interaction that produce richer and more meaningful experiences. Designers have myriad tools to encourage our imaginations, nourish our creativity, and hone our abilities to build narratives. We wield those tools far more effectively when we understand how imagination, creativity and narrative form a robust framework for the practice of Design.
Arne Lang-Ree is co-founder and CDO of Spanner.
An innovator, thinker and deconstructor, Arne challenges himself and Spanner’s clients to bring sustainable and responsible products to life. Born in Norway, Arne was inspired early by his engineer father to look at things twice. At an early age, he was imagining inventions that ultimately inspired him to earn both his BSME in Mechanical Engineering and MSE in Product Design from Stanford University. Arne has since racked up more than 30 years of product development and mechanical design experience in a wide range of product markets and with globally recognized brands. Arne is rarely without his trusted canine sidekick, Penny, and the duo can be found at the Spanner office creating together or walking the Silicon Valley for inspiration.
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