Brain-centered design and creativity
By Enrico Viceconte, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Master of Science Design for Buit Environment
Published in italian in Manuale di Neuromarketing, Hoepli, 2020
Herbert Simon, Nobel laureate for his studies on bounded rationality, in the book “The sciences of the artificial”, laid the foundations for a general theory of design. As well as the natural sciences describe how things are, the artificial sciences deal with how things should be to “work”, that is, to achieve goals. The distinction is not between what is organic and what is artificial, because a cultivated field, Simon writes, is both organic and artificial. Just as it is true that every human artifact derives from biological impulses. Preserving homeostasis and looking towards the future are part of the biological nature that we have in common with single-celled organisms and viruses, writes Damasio. “Feelings” predispose us to preserve the safety of our habitat and habits from external threats and to seek new opportunities and new behaviors. Building a house or a ship represent two complementary expressions of that elan vital, the creative force of life, of which Bergson philosophized in the early 1900s. The difference, not even so clear, between us and other living beings (which we call planning) is in the level of awareness. It is deeply human to design and build a house to defend ourselves and a ship to explore, colonize and trade. The two complementary drives of Ulysses, archetypically represented by Estìa, goddess of the hearth, and Hermes, goddess with winged feet, often represented together in Greek vase painting, are in the psychology of the depth. But also in the most archaic biological mechanisms.
Damasio’s essential insight is that feelings are “mental experiences of states of the body”, which arise when the brain interprets emotions, themselves physical states resulting from the body’s responses to external stimuli. Damasio suggested that consciousness, either the primitive “fundamental consciousness” of animals or the “extended” self-conception of humans, which requires autobiographical memory and emerges from emotions and feelings.
Each design act, in the different phases in which it can be broken down by a theory and a practice of design, must deal with the “mental experiences of states of the body”. Both when designing and building for oneself (Ulysses’ thalamus in Ithaca, made from an olive tree rooted in the floor) and when designing and building for other purposes (The wooden horse to attract and deceive the Trojans). This was clear even before the idea was incorporated into the “design thinking” and “user centered design” methodologies. As well as the multi-faceted “ingenium” (polythropos) of those who makes enters, with their product, the user’s activity cycle, the designer enters their mind. If using an artifact means being facilitated in the gratifying achievement of one’s goals (value in use), designing an artifact means making a virtual model “spin” in one’s mind, but also in one’s body, through an overall empathy with the user, only of the configured object, but also of the user.
As in literature the writer has in mind a “model reader”, of whom he can predict a certain range of feelings during the reading process, so the designer should assume a range of feelings of the “model user”, taht is the last link in the value chain, whose brain is an active part of its neurophysiological response. A model that today is called Persona, using (in English) the Latin word for “theatrical mask”. Impersonating the user, wearing the mask that represents his or her “character” on the consumer scene, is part of the design process. Both in the individual and authorial form, and in the form in which a project team identifies, and when it is the user himself who is involved in the co-design of the artifact.
The shift from the authorship of design, which survives for example in certain sectors of expressive consumption, such as fashion, to a design partnership is an interesting phenomenon that raises many questions which, in my opinion, mitigate a certain excessive enthusiasm with which design thinking methodologies are proposed and adopted.
A US school of thought, which is well represented by IDEO, has almost eliminated the weight, within the design processes, of the classic role of an author, capable of empathically intuiting the effect of his/her design decisions. The author “auctor”, that is, endowed with “authority”, “authority” and the ability to “amplification” (Latin “augere”), who gives way to the user’s voice, using every possible methodology not only to collect customers explicit needs, but also to express that inner and profound voice that finds little chance of emerging from the questions of a questionnaire or from the interactions of a focus group.
The currently most popular approach, based on structured and collective phases of approaching the heart and mind of the user, is the result of an evolution that is not only methodological, but also philosophical.
The Homeric poems testify to the archaic perception that creativity is dictated in the mind of man by a divinity who speaks in the mind of the author. Further on, Aristotle, in “Poetics”, captures the mimetic (simulation) dimension of creativity that we still recognize, the metaphorical and finally the cathartic one, which concerns both the timic sphere (about emotions and passions) and the ethical one , about values. Something that keeps poiein, the doing, artistic from the technical, well separated, that of the material culture of everyday things designed and built for practical uses. Romanticism has emphasized the essential role of the author of feeling within himself of the creative process. The industrial revolution has given the design process an engineering dimension of design which leads to the possibility, pursued by the Hochschule für Gestaltung of Ulm in the 1960s, of resorting to a “method” and a defined process. A recognition of creativity in the artisanal and practical dimension of designing, but not separated, as for example in Morris’s nineteenth-century movement “Arts and craft”, from the aesthetic one. Finally, in the middle of the last century, there was a “linguistic turn” in the theories of design that raised the question of the meaning that things, as systems of signs, assume for those who use them. The current theory of design thinking would like to synthesize both the design “method” and the semiotic approach. But without getting lost in semiotic discussions on the “meaning of meaning”. With a practical cut and with the use of user centered settings crowded with people, full of post-its on the walls and simulacra of “Personas”.
The work done by Roberto Verganti on “Design Driven Innovation” mitigates this overly user-centered US vision, which, while accepting the importance of the design team with respect to the creation of the single “auctor”, acknowledges the need for those who design not only to answer the functional-emotional question of the user (outside in) but also to decide according to the feelings inside the design group (inside-out).
Fear is the same that has always arisen when evaluating an innovation: if you had asked someone, at the end of the nineteenth century, about their mobility needs, they would have asked for better trains and carriages and not cars and planes. The designer and the engineer, but also the artist have the role of anticipating what is possible. And this requires a form of creativity other than that based on listening to and observing the feelings of others. David Hume, in his Treatise on human nature, underlined the difference between the role of the “facility” and that of the “novelty” in the acceptance of aesthetic value. The facility relates to the comfort of homeostasis, the possibility of superimposing new patterns on established ones, the biological need to move slightly around homeostasis. The novelty corresponds to the vital impulse towards the new. To build new schemes for new future opportunities. Hume, quoted by Gillo Dorfles in his “Le oscillazioni del gusto”, writes: “Without novelty there is no interest and there is no appeal from the work; but on the other hand, without a bit of facility — that is, advance knowledge of the work and ease in understanding it — there is also no easy acceptance by the public. The public, therefore, always wanted the new, but a new that could be deciphered ».
The current participatory and democratic methodologies of design thinking, have a risk. They are useful for minimizing the risks of product failure and the time to market, by removing an “author” from the possibility of breaking the mold, but they risk to flatten the response to the demand for innovation emerging from the depths of collective thought ofthe market. The risk is sacrificating the potential of the “creative” brain.
There is a powerful movement of “Lean product development”, which takes the label of “agile project management” or “agile programming” in the culture of software development, Systems Engineering, in the culture of developing artifacts with high technical and systemic complexity such as aerospace and infrastructure. In the field of designing artifacts with a high degree of interaction with the user, along a “touch” sequence in which the experience is formed, this “lean” logic becomes design thinking. In all these cases, the objectives of the design process become not only those of providing (within the established costs and times) what the customer needs on a practical and emotional level, but also of eliminating the activities that the customer is not willing to pay . Among these activities are waiting times, second thoughts, misunderstandings, unsolicited functions or missing functions. This logic inevitably leads to the creation of design methodologies that make interaction and validation continuous throughout the design, both with professionals of different specializations and business functions, and with customers.
In this organizational context in which it is the customer who “pulls” the value towards him, the way in which the designing brain is used is certainly very different from the way in which a designer “pushed” his own “intuition of value” towards the market.
The neurological basis of this type of widespread and social creativity, rather than concentrated and authorial, is obviously very different from those imagined by William Morris in his “Arts and Crafts” movement. And also from the processes of artistic creativity on which Freud questioned himself and on which the criticism of art and literature developed their theories. This observation also extends to the creativity of scientists and inventors. Science and technology, no longer the fruit of the genius of an individual, albeit in the condition of making use of shared knowledge, but as a team game.
I believe that this requires further research work on the part of neuroscience which, having abandoned the perspective of individual genius, will be able to tackle the creative process in the context of cooperation processes between individuals. In support of organizational planning that often ignores the understanding of the most ancient and tested basic mechanisms of our mind.
