arkitrave :: log

As I finish the school year and am either sleeping or thinking about design, I thought I’d post Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Growth. He is best known (at least to architects) for being the graphic designer for Rem Koolhaas’ book S, M, L, XL. Many of these are great points; a few I am not so sure about.

Sorry to the non-hover people out there, you don’t get to see the spans. Sorry to everyone else for the schizo-jumping thing…I don’t have time to think about how to get the spans to display without the other list items moving. I think the jumping is the nature of the beast when using list items with spans; my understanding of CSS is that I couldn’t get these to display without jumping unless I did the markup differently and used, perhaps, absolutely positioned divs. The spans aren’t acting as children of the li items when I absolutely position them (i.e. they are positioning relative to the parent element). Anyone know what the correct behavior should be? OK, with position:relative on the li items it would work, but I decided I liked it better the way it is. Feel free to discuss the actual content now!

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites
   for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed
   by them.
2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on.
   Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that
   may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you???ë?¬?ll never
   have real growth.
3. Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process
   we will only ever go to where we???ë?¬?ve already been. If process drives outcome
   we may not know where we???ë?¬?re going, but we will know we want to be there.
4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of
   growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations,
   attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun
   of failure every day.
5. Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of
   value.
6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different
   question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.
7. Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as
   an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.
8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment.
   Postpone criticism.
9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a
   common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.
10. Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge.
    Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.
11. Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous
    environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical
    rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.
12. Keep moving. The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce
    success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.
13. Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities
    may present themselves.
14. Don???ë?¬?t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself
    from limits of this sort.
15. Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the
    answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate
    of an infant.
16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict,
    friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.
17. ???ë??Ü???ë??Ü???ë??Ü???ë??Ü???ë??Ü???ë??Ü???ë??Ü???ë??Ü???ë??Ü???ë??Ü. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven???ë?¬?t
    had yet, and for the ideas of others.
18. Stay up late. Strange things happen when you???ë?¬?ve gone too far, been up too
    long, worked too hard, and you???ë?¬?re separated from the rest of the world.
19. Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for something
    other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.
20. Be careful to take risks. Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday
    and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.
21. Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don???ë?¬?t like it, do it
    again.
22. Make your own tools. Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things.
    Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration.
    Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big
    difference.
23. Stand on someone???ë?¬?s shoulders. You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments
    of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.
24. Avoid software. The problem with software is that everyone has it.
25. Don???ë?¬?t clean your desk. You might find something in the morning that you
    can???ë?¬?t see tonight.
26. Don???ë?¬?t enter awards competitions. Just don???ë?¬?t. It???ë?¬?s not good for you.
27. Read only left-hand pages. Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the
    amount of information, we leave room for what he called our ???ë??noodle.???ë??
28. Make new words. Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way
    of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates
    new conditions.
29. Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.
30. Organization = Liberty. Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens
    in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise.
    Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio
    can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between ???ë??creatives???ë?? and ???ë??suits???ë??
    is what Leonard Cohen calls a ‘charming artifact of the past.’
31. Don???ë?¬?t borrow money. Once again, Frank Gehry???ë?¬?s advice. By maintaining financial
    control, we maintain creative control. It???ë?¬?s not exactly rocket science, but
    it???ë?¬?s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have
    failed.
32. Listen carefully. Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him
    or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine.
    By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions,
    we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.
33. Take field trips. The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your
    TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically
    rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic???ë?¬®simulated environment.
34. Make mistakes faster. This isn???ë?¬?t my idea ???ë??Ü I borrowed it. I think it belongs
    to Andy Grove.
35. Imitate. Don???ë?¬?t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You???ë?¬?ll never
    get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only
    to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp???ë?¬?s large glass
    to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.
36. Scat. When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else
    ???묨? but not words.
37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.
38. Explore the other edge. Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run
    with the technological pack. We can???ë?¬?t find the leading edge because it???ë?¬?s trampled
    underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but
    still rich with potential.
39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside
    of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces ???ë??Ü what Dr. Seuss calls
    ???ë??the waiting place.???ë?? Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference
    with all of the infrastructure of a conference ???ë??Ü the parties, chats, lunches,
    airport arrivals ???ë??Ü but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful
    and spawned many ongoing collaborations.
40. Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes
    are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable
    efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job
    is to jump the fences and cross the fields.
41. Laugh. People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since
    I???ë?¬?ve become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are
    expressing ourselves.
42. Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory,
    innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory
    is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous
    moment or event. That???ë?¬?s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not
    a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different
    from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.
43. Power to the people. Play can only happen when people feel they have control
    over their lives. We can???ë?¬?t be free agents if we???ë?¬?re not free.

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