natalia ilyin

In an unguarded, light and carefree moment, lulled by sun, the scent of lavender and a large double latte in a big china cup, I recently told a friend of mine that I did not consider him a genius. What an error. Take a brilliant American writer and tell him you don't consider him a genius and he'll crumple like a California poppy at evening. I did my best to explain, but the damage was done. Again the semiotic interpretant reared its sleepy bed-head and stared dully at me through the tousled sheets of communication. Again I wondered that anyone is ever able to get anything across to anyone else.

Oddly, I had meant this observation as a compliment. To a Russian-American like me, being called "a genius" is not a particularly good thing. But of course, this writer is not Russian, did not grow up with Russians, and was using the American interpretation of what "genius" means.

To an American, being a genius is being Alexander Graham Bell. It's being a brisk inventor in a white coat and clean laboratory with some pretty colored liquids bubbling away in retorts in the background. It's the person thinking up and feeding equations into a gorgeous array of computer terminals in order to unlock a cure for Alzheimer's. In the US, a genius is the person who finds the cure, saves the day, figures out how to cap the oil spill-- gets the society out of a sticky wicket by using his brain. In the arts, American genius writers save the day by telling the reader what it is that needs to be saved, and often stand around looking craggy and stalwart. They all seem to have vertical creases in their tanned cheeks. Even the women.

But to a Russian, being labelled a genius is not being labelled the clean guy in the white lab coat. It's being labelled Grigory Perelman: Strange eyes, big bushy beard, tangled eyebrows, hair like an unclipped shrubbery. A recluse. Lives in small apartment with cat. Even the UPI syndicate couldn't track him down recently for comment when he turned down a million dollars won for solving a 99 year-old open mathematics problem called the Poincare Conjecture. Turned it down because of vague and unexplained dissatisfactions with the "international mathematics community." Now see: THIS is the Russian take on "genius." THIS is why, when a Russian says, "Your son is a genius," he tends to look down at the floor and wag his head slowly from side to side. The Chinese curse is, "May you live in interesting times." The Russian curse could be, "May you depend on a genius."

Brilliance, to the Russian, is the great thing. A brilliant composer is a contributor-- he is not a lunatic who writes wonderful stuff but decides for some reason to burn it and to only eat carrots from then on. A brilliant composer lives a rounded life: it may have its emotional upheavals, but it is not completely without one toe on the ground of reality. He shows up for the audience. A brilliant writer, to a Russian, is a writer who sums up human experience and at the same time describes the truth of individual existence in that universal experience.

But a Russian genius is different. He is a human that looks like an ordinary three-dimensional human but sports a brain connected to something other. Though finite in size, he lacks any boundary. The Russian writing genius tends to take a downward plunge. He may start as a brilliant writer, but then will wander into being a political conservative or an anarchistic nutball, finally packing up his possessions in a small sack and running away from home at the age of ninety, as Leo Tolstoy did. Tolstoy was a genius. Anna Ahkmatova was brilliant. She was three-dimensional, every poem she wrote tightened the loop of existence to a point. She manned the lariat.

Mama Perelman, should she still be with us, should she be the old pensioner I think she probably is, must have been ready to defenestrate her son for the unbelievable stupidity of not taking the prize money in Russia's current economy. (True, he felt that most of the work had been done by another mathematician, and this was truly honorable, if misguided from the standpoint of finances of day-to-day living.) "But what can you do," her pensioner friends at the vegetable stall probably said with a shrug after the call came through and the money was forever lost-- "What can you do? He's a genius."

Russian geniuses make life an absolute hell of absurdity and missed appointments for their wives, daughters, mothers, priests, Party Commissars, mechanics, landlords and co-workers. They routinely run their cars out of gas, forget to pick up whatever it was they were supposed to pick up, make ridiculous decisions and lousy judgements about everyday things like locking doors and feeding pets, assume that mathematical logic and life are related, say the wrong thing at the Party meeting, complain that they just "can't make you understand" the obvious logic and value of their most inane arguments.

They're at once child-like and childish, sometimes charming, always selfish, thoughtless and entitled. And though they might be terribly funny and be able to imitate people or improvise operas at the piano or figure out a conundrum or prove a theorum, in the end their lives usually turn out lonesome. The people who wanted to be close to them have finally had enough of them. Reality is a hair-shirt for a genius, a hair-shirt he only forgets when in his head or on his stage. How many die like Tolstoy, overcome in a train station on his final run from home, held in the arms of a woman he couldn't abide?

To the Russian mind, genius is a curse, not a blessing. "He was a genius," my grandmother used to say, and then, after a pause, she'd repeat, "He was a genius. He died."

Much of what my grandmother knew instinctively-- and taught us all instinctively--our culture suddenly realizes it must rediscover. She was not a naturalist or a flower-child, just a normal person, a normal woman of her era who understood where she fit in. Everything was a part of everything else. The compost fed the rose. She treated Nature in the same way that she treated people. They had their ups and downs, just like relationships with people do, but it was a relationship based on respect. That's just the way she thought, and how the people who had reared her had thought. Was she radical? No. Just measured--just related to her surroundings.

I recently came upon the work of Murray Bookchin, a wild-eyed eco-revolutionary of the Rachel Carson era. “The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital," said Bookchin. His argument was that most of the activities that consume energy and destroy the environment are senseless because they contribute little to quality of life and well being. Is this radical? Thought to be. So radical that these ideas split the American Green Movement right in half.

But the plunder of the spirit being tied to the plunder of the earth was completely obvious--wordlessly obvious-- to my grandmother, whose own grandfather (now we're going back to before the American Civil War) was known around Gaffney for letting a third of his land lie fallow every growing season. He didn't believe in using the new fertilizers, he didn't believe in beating the soil into submission and for this reason he missed out on a third more revenue every summer. Radically stick-in-the-mud? Or forward thinking?

Bookchin, the radical Marxist, said that the function of work is to legitimize, even create, hierarchy. He believed that understanding the transformation of organic into hierarchical societies is crucial to finding a way forward. I'd say that understanding that transformation is crucial to finding our way backward--back to the cyclic rather than the one-off, back to the sustainable rather than the pillaged-- back to the dreams of the lover rather than those of the rapist.

Since the inception of design, the myth of the black-clad, chain-smoking, heavy drinking, overworked designer has been the Romantic ideal. Where I went to school, these slumped, hung-over, chain-smoking designers perched on studio stools all over the design building. We called them Art Balls. Gender didn't factor in. Sometimes a studio looked like it had been taken over by these black blobs with four metal legs.

Designers-- graphic, game, motion, apparel, architectural, or interior-- have amazingly sensitive antennae that pick up the smallest social indications about what they should act like, what they should emulate and how they want to be perceived. In response, they become semiotic semaphores, signaling their hipster-ness, their nonconformism, their sensitivity or, alternatively, their conservative modernism, their neo-modernism or their eclecticism through their clothing and their actions.

Is it a left-over pose from the myth of the Romantic Hero-- the wild-eyed painter swashing away at his "Liberty Leading the People?" Is it a feint at the garb of shamanism? At dividing oneself from the "average" person in order to retain mystic connection to powers greater than Self? Is it a hangover from the avant-garde of 100 years ago, a monk-like resistance to the luxury and lures of the comfortable bourgeoisie? Or is it the stance of the basement guitar hero who knows, deep inside, that no girls will ever scream for him?

Embracing and living the Art Ball life of chain-smoking, energy-drinks and alcohol may be a pleasant way to form an identity at 19, but if you're living that way at thirty you're going to have all the mental freshness of a Goodwill sofa. By 40 you'll be enjoying a Thorazine highball daily between managing hacking cough-spasms and auto-dialing your ex, begging for permission to see the kids. Rock stars don't need to come up with new ideas all the time. Like restaurant chefs, they perfect perhaps 40 standard recipes and spend their lives repeating them to different audiences. Not so the designer. Every pancake is a new pancake; every song a new song, sung once.

So here's an idea. Design could start to value the idea of the happy, balanced designer. I know. It sounds so wrong. The entire structure of design is against happiness and balance in its practitioners. What would we talk about if we didn't talk about how tired we were, how overworked, how busy, how stressed? Imagine knowing a designer that wasn't hurting himself in some way. Such a designer would turn the whole mythology of design on its head. Which needs to happen. Because, let's face it, if a designer does not understand what it takes to sustain Self and spirit, do you really want his taking on designing sustainable things? For sustainable things, at this point, are really the only interesting design things.

And so I press you to take heed of the Committee for Happy American Designers at www.happydesigners.tumblr.com. They've had enough of the old Art Ball paradigm. They're swimming upstream, relearning how to eat, sleep, design, play and connect with other people--not just machines----all in the same 24-hour period. Shocking, I know. Radical. And it's an uphill fight, what with most of the art directors in the world having been schooled in the old "hurt yourself" mythology. It could be crushed or it could be the beginning of something better than what we've got now. Sustainable design must start with teaching designers to sustain their own lives, their heart. I'm with them: It's time we say goodbye to the Art Ball.

So this is exciting. I get to speak at Impact! Design for Social Change, a new, six-week summer intensive program co-founded by Steven Heller of SVA and Mark Randall of Worldstudio. It's planned to "introduce participants to a growing field of design for social advocacy."

I don't know what I'm going to talk about yet. But probably about how Therese and I designed and established our refugee-relief project, The SisterScarf Fund, eight years ago, to provide microgrants for community-identified pressing needs on the border of Thailand and Burma. I could definitely speak on what we've learned and where we want to go with the project.

Here's more information on the six-week course !mpact SVA::

The program, scheduled between July 12 and August 20th of 2010, will bring together design thinking and social entrepreneurship to discuss ways that design strategy supports the constituencies of non-profits.

The curriculum zeroes in on three aspects of design for social change: evolving your big idea, developing your pitch, and funding your project. These lessons will be divided into two tracks, as described below:

The first will educate students on how to conceive and execute their own projects for social change with a focus on funding projects that are not client-based. For the second track students will participate in the development and full execution of a team project that addresses a pressing need within a predetermined community. The team projects for the program are being selected in partnership with desigNYC—a group of leading designers and design advocates with a mission of improving life in New York City by helping connect the nonprofit and professional design communities.

Faculty include Mark Randall, Steven Heller, Andréa Pellegrino, Bob McKinnon, and Martin Kace, with guest lecturers David Gibson, Milton Glaser, Scott Harrison, Natalia Ilyin, Jason Rzepka and Edwin Schlossberg.

Learn more about the faculty, lecturers, curriculum and application process at their website: http://www.sva.edu/impact/

I am slow to these things but Heather N. kindly passed me the URL for my new favorite game: Is it a cheese or is it a font?

http://cheeseorfont.mogrify.org/

Not as easy as you may suppose.

While ruminating about the current vogue for "design thinking" and about how this trend is suddenly bothering me, I ran across this article by Peter Meholz, which ran in the Harvard Business Review last October.
(http://blogs.hbr.org/merholz/2009/10/why-design-thinking-wont-save.html)
I could not agree with him more.

Here's Meholz's post in its entirety:

Why Design Thinking Won't Save You

Whenever I see a business magazine glow about design thinking, as BusinessWeek has done recently with this special report, and which Harvard Business Review did last year it gets my dander up. Not because I don't see the value of design (I started a company dedicated to experience design), but because the discussion in such articles is inevitably so fetishistic, and sadly limited.

Design thinking is trotted out as a salve for businesses who need help with innovation. The idea is that the left-brained, MBA-trained, spreadsheet-driven crowd has squeezed all the value they can out of their methods. To fix things, all you need to do is apply some right-brained turtleneck-wearing "creatives," "ideating" tons of concepts and creating new opportunities for value out of whole cloth.

The first thing that's distressing about this is the dismissal of the spreadsheet crowd. Should they be the sole voice? No. Can they contribute meaningfully? Hell, yeah. In the BusinessWeek piece there's a slide show identifying the 21 people who will change business. I'm thrilled that among the chosen is my colleague and co-author, Brandon Schauer. Brandon is an excellent designer, but it's important to recognize that key to his ability to identify innovations is that he has two master's degrees, and one of them is the now-dreaded MBA. Design thinking alone is not sufficient, but when mixed with solid business thinking, it can produce a combustible mixture.

But talking about only "design thinking" and "business thinking" is limiting. Me? My degree is in anthropology. And a not-so-secret truth about "design thinking" is that a big chunk of it is actually "social science thinking." Design thinkers talk about being "human-centered" and "empathic," and the tools they use to achieve that are methods borrowed from anthropology and sociology. Believe me, until very recently, they didn't teach customer research at design schools. In fact, when I began working in this field, the practice of design was remarkably solipsistic — I'd have to harangue designers to care about the person using what we created.

However, that's still not enough. Two of Adaptive Path's founders, Jesse James Garrett and Jeffrey Veen, were trained in journalism. And much of our company's success has been in utilizing journalistic approaches to gathering information, winnowing it down, finding the core narrative, and telling it concisely. So business can definitely benefit from such "journalism thinking."

But wait — there's more! We have librarians, and historians, and fine artists. All of these disciplinary backgrounds allow people to bring distinct perspectives to our work, allowing for insights that wouldn't be achieved if we were all cut from the same cloth. Do we need to espouse "library thinking," "history thinking," and "arts thinking?" Should we look at Steve Jobs' background, and say what business needs is more "calligraphic thinking?"

Obviously, this is getting absurd, but that's the point. The supposed dichotomy between "business thinking" and "design thinking" is foolish. It's like the line from The Blues Brothers, in response to the question "What kind of music do you usually have here?", the woman responds, "We got both kinds. We got country and western." Instead, what we must understand is that in this savagely complex world, we need to bring as broad a diversity of viewpoints and perspectives to bear on whatever challenges we have in front of us. While it's wise to question the supremacy of "business thinking," shifting the focus only to "design thinking" will mean you're missing out on countless possibilities.