Process vs Product

I believe that the process is what gives value to the product. It’s not that one is more important than the other, in fact they are equally as valuable. 

As a creative you often find yourself obsessed with the practice. To me it’s about writing to test and explore the ideas before shaping them. I also wrote about how (great) design starts with language.

Show the work in progress

Transparency is a fundamental principle related to creation because process makes thinking visible. Writing, documenting work in progress, and decoding yourself are ways to show what you think and how you see the world. 

In order to be credible, you must be authentic and true. What better way to be that than through your work in progress. Every time I’m sharing something new, I also choose to share the behind the scenes, what people often don’t see and are curious about. This means sharing errors, iterations, sources of inspiration and so on. 

Being transparent means being honest, authentic and showing imperfections. Both individuals and organizations can benefit by being open and transparent on their process. The benefit of being small is that you can be very open and show the process. It can be way harder for bigger established brands.

This doesn't mean that big brands can't share their process with the people. Think of the book “Something's Off” about the collab between Virgil Abloh and Nike, where it shows them using whatsapp during the creative process. Also, I was very surprised when I found out that Matthieu Blazy, creative director of Bottega Veneta, made free fanzines to tell the creative secrets behind his collections.

This idea of transparency can be difficult to embrace as we tend to show the best of ourselves, especially online. But perfectionism doesn't exist; it's just a myth. Perfectionism doesn't advance anything, so don't get stuck by it. The only way is to embrace imperfections, share them transparently and make refinements through iterations and feedback.

BIG is proud to show the process to its clients. They show all the iterations conducting to the final work

Who is truly original?

It’s ok to reference. Believing in original ideas that come from nothing is overrated because everything is connected. Creativity is more about discovering than conceiving. Everything is inspired by and built on the work of others, often even unconsciously. There are many ideas out there and you can only see them if you are curious.

Art wasn’t built around the idea of ownership, it was more like “learn by reproduction”. Now, many disciplines that are daughters of art, such as fashion, design and architecture, tend to keep their own ideas in check, hiding them from others and punishing those that are not 100% original. 

I think the only way to progress is to build on the ideas of others. Appropriate to learn and move things forward. This does not mean stealing without adding anything, your point of view is always required and you must refer to sources.

Failure = Progress

It’s ok also to make mistakes, they are part of the formula. They are important because without them there wouldn’t be progress. You have to face a certain amount of failure in order to innovate or progress with your work. Showing those mistakes in the process is what makes the work real and authentic.

Mistakes allowed James Dyson to progress so that he made his cyclonic vacuum after 5125 handmade prototypes. If you are trying to do something new, to go down a road that someone has not yet traveled, you have to accept that you may encounter failure. 

Sometimes to make creative decisions you need to trust and follow your gut instinct. Intuition is something really powerful, like a human machine learning algorithm. This creative confidence that spills over into design comes from past mistakes and experiences.

You can copy the product but you cannot copy the way of working

Process is at the core of creation. Understanding the process means owning the result. To create original products you need to control the whole process, not only the design but also the building and selling part. 

When we look at a finished product, we need to see not just the design of the object but also the process that enabled that result. Knowing your practice and your process ultimately leads to knowing what you make.

There are many companies that try to copy products, and this is a strategy that can work in the short term. To thrive in the long run you need to know your process intimately. It consists of many elements including methodologies, inspirations, conversations that cannot be replicated unless you have the same people on the team. Like MSCHF which is unpredictable and includes anyone in their creative process, even their lawyers and manufacturers who will influence the end result.

“Unconventional processes, unpredictable results.” 
- Massimo Osti

Creative process in the age of machine intelligence

Now with AI we see the outcome right away, even if we are at the start of the process and that changes several things.

So we get fixated with the end result and are forced to think about it, even before we’ve started. Even so, these tools give us a lot of opportunity to iterate so that we don't get fixated with the first options. 

If language is the genesis of the design process, in this case it serves to get a hyper realistic and finalized result of an image from right away. The more input we give, the more precise responses we get.

The essence of the creative process is exploration, we often don’t know what we are going to get and that’s what makes products even more interesting. Our design decisions are often driven by intuition. This gut feeling is not something you can reproduce and make fast with a machine.