Ideas Into Data

This essay is published on Medium.com, along with others

I noticed what was happening long before I had a name or explanation for it: some very smart clients would use a process that seemed to respect creativity but was in fact a way to strip subjectivity from design. I spent a week at an esteemed business school attempting to fully plumb what I felt was happening to me; I was being MBA’d by graduates who had learned a diabolical technique (at biz schools, of course).

Key to the maneuver was the project brief. We designers know that when we present ideas to clients we often skew the brief (redefining the problem) to make our solution appear more inevitable. And so, apparently, do our smartest clients. Defining, or redefining, the brief is a critical way to set expectations, and a clever way to make a solution seem, well, inevitable.

This ownership of the brief is a way to reorient the client; to both break the bounds of the brief while focusing the brief more narrowly on the solutions that seem most promising to the designer. While it may seem manipulative it is part of how designers think. We are constantly solving problems, and want clearly defined problems by nudging the Venn diagrams (you know, the way Trump included Alabama in the hurricane path). We do it not to exclude the client from the process but to add a layer of experience, wisdom and insight into the problem…hopefully.

When we are being MBA’d the client (usually the client’s project manager) iterates our program definition in her own words, but first she needs to repossess the brief. This usually starts with a download from the designer to the owner, ostensibly to ensure the designer fully understands the parameters at play. What is actually happening is more insidious.

Well-educated clients (and there is a reason they are the clients and we are in service to them; they tend to be really smart) then play back a ‘restacked’ version of the designer’s own words as a brief. The words make sense as words; they are grammatically sound and syntactically cogent. They seemed to describe a plausible goal, with built-in limits and guidelines for evaluating results. But they may circumscribe the problem with such micromanaged control that all invention is wrung out of the potential solutions.

Essentially it is “tell me everything you know about X” which tend to be the more easily communicated, objective aspects of the project, followed by “here is what you said, artfully rearranged, as your mandate”. It seems so plausible and even ‘helpful’, but plausibility is the cloak under which these often impossible (or simply inadvisable) briefs were obfuscated.

I often have the deflated sense, at this point in the process, that the problem just became much harder to solve, and I devolved from an enthusiastic partner to a resentful drudge. Something crucial was removed and it was hard to track what or how it had evaporated from such a promising endeavor.

Effectively ideas were being digitized, converted to data to allow the smart (alec) client to level the playing field with an experienced designer. The initial download request cleverly put the data on the record…minus the experience, talent, creativity, insight and innovation that, in fact, is the reason to work with a designer. It comes from a place of insecurity; either a hedge against failure in the eyes of the C-level (“I told them to do XYZ right here on the brief!”), or a personal need to dominate all players no matter their particular expertise (sound familiar?).

The data set created allows a subjective process to be objectified. The data that begins as a result of experience and insight turns into a framing device when replayed, describing a boundary so tailored as to wring all lateral thinking out of bounds. Frank Gehry’s quote “I don’t know why people hire architects and then tell them what to do” may seem arrogant (and is, a bit), but I guarantee he has been MBA’d as much as any of us. It is really his reaction to arrogance.

Digitizing information was, in the hands of Claude Shannon and other 20th century geniuses, a way of taking the immeasurable (how large is a telephone conversation?, for example) and giving them a common scale of measurement. It doesn’t imply that reverse engineering can create a telephone conversation, just as a cost analysis of a building design can’t be reverse engineered into the building itself. Data is a way to objectify information, but it can stymie creation when inserted in the wrong part of the process.

This is not, btw, to imply that digitization is not indispensable to making things, as clearly it is our most useful tool. As a consultant described the transition from ordinary CAD or manual drafting to Parametric Design, “you used to spend your time abstracting the building into drawings (essentially sets of instructions) but now you build the building (virtually) and the drawings follow”.

Until algorithms can generate metaphor, create lateral solutions and find inspiration in mistakes, look at art, embrace unique POV transformations, and collect a lifetime of experience to act as a backstory to the next new thing, we should be clear about how the future is made manifest:

By designers.

Coda

Designers can play a similar, if often ineffective, game. Architects, especially, are still suffering PTSD from the loss of prestige and control that started (depending on who you ask) either 500 years ago or 50 years ago, or at some point in between. Once the Master Builders, the unquestioned authority on all things three dimensional, we are now mostly commodified adjuncts to processes outside our control.

This was made obvious to me in the last century, at an unforgettable 1995 panel moderated by Jonathan Barnett with Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei and David Rockefeller all onstage at the Caspary Auditorium of Rockefeller University. The context alone should have said it all; Rockefeller University (Founded by David’s grandfather) in an auditorium designed by Wallace Harrison (who designed Rockefeller Center, among other establishment icons) with octogenarians Johnson (pushing 90 at the time), IM Pei (coming up on 80) and David Rockefeller (80 years old) regaling the mostly young audience.

The moment of truth came when, after Johnson and Pei had gone on about their own careers (exuding false modesty while clearly establishing their own place in their universe of power) when David Rockefeller cleared his throat before saying “When father donated the land for the United Nations…”. It was a jaw dropping prologue to whatever he said next, which we have all forgotten. The nexus of power shifted visibly on the stage, and the quiet voice of David Rockefeller held it all.

Architects have struggled, begrudgingly, with the knowledge that they are practically interchangeable. They have invented an argot of obfuscation to attempt to regain their lost paradise. They have cited Derrida and created an aura of intellectualism around their work as an expression of their own insecurity.

But David Rockefeller is still right; power resides elsewhere.