Design vs Creative Thinking
I’m quickly realizing that, in the context of my work as an interactive soul, I am a design thinker rather than a creative thinker. Really, I should say that I’m a designer and not a creative, but, given the way interactive marketing and advertising fetishizes the word creative (it’s a noun and a verb! it has BIG ideas!), I am afraid to relinquish the possibility of me participating in that word, even in a poorly-trafficed blog.
- Designers care about and enjoy how, creatives are bored by implementation
- Designers think god is in the details, creatives think the devil is
- Designers think about duration, durability, emergence, and long arcs of emotion; creatives think about the high, quick burst spikes of emotion
- Dare I say it: Designers care about foreplay and the afterward; Creatives focus on orgasms (seems like a way to show that I care about and understand sex as a motivator and maintain cred as at least a faux-creative)
- Designers are persistent, incurable foxes; Creatives are serial hedgehogs (See below for fox/hedgehog backgorund)
Different modes, different ways. I am almost at peace with this.
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Fox and Hedgehog
from Isaiah Berlin’s essay, “The Fox and the Hedgehog“:
there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single, central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms which they understand, think and feel … and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way … these last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal than than centripetal
the first is hedgehog (creatives), the second is the fox (designers)
I think one thing you left out is the attitude towards the new or the original. Some people enjoy just being creative, while others think it is more important to create something new, even if it means giving up what might currently give them joy. I think that’s where the implementation part comes in — implementation happens out of old news. Someone concerned with the new wants to go on with the next thing by the time the implementation phase comes in. Too little concern for the new and one’s work becomes stale, too much concern for the new and one stops working.
Interesting view. Starts to break down a bit when you throw in things like: ideas an innovation. In your model above these would be more attributed to creatives. But think about innovative product design. Or an experience like staying at the Four Seasons where everyone addresses you by name — surely the team that “designed” that experience was all about the details.
David!
I don’t think the fox/hedgehog excludes ideas on either side, or creativity in general. In the essay, Berlin points out that there are great creative geniuses in both camps. Proust, Dante, Dostoevsky, and Plato are hedgehogs, while Shakespeare, Cervantes, Aristotle, and Pushkin are foxes. (He also hastens to add that one shouldn’t push the framework too far . . .
I’m also using the term creatives, in a very industry specific fashion. Designers and creatives are creative, but with different rhythms, emphases, starting points, goals, etc.
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