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An Incomplete
Manifesto for Growth
from the
Bruce Mau Design
blog
Written in 1998, the Incomplete Manifesto is an
articulation of statements that exemplify Bruce Mau's beliefs,
motivations and strategies. It also articulates how the BMD studio
works.
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'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've already been. If
process drives outcome we may not know where we’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’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. ____________________. Intentionally left blank. Allow space
for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.
18. Stay up late. Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far,
been up too long, worked too hard, and you'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’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’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’t clean your desk. You might find something in the
morning that you can’t see tonight.
26. Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. It’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 "noodle."
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 "creatives" and "suits" is what Leonard Cohen
calls a 'charming artifact of the past.'
31. Don’t borrow money. Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By
maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not
exactly rocket science, but it’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–simulated environment.
34. Make mistakes faster. This isn’t my idea -- I borrowed it. I
think it belongs to Andy Grove.
35. Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you
can. You'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’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 ... 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’t find the leading
edge because it’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 --
what Dr. Seuss calls "the waiting place." Hans Ulrich Obrist once
organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of
a conference -- the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — 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'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’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't be free agents if we’re not
free.
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