Conceptualizing

Watching Alan Rosenblum, Newschool of Architecture & Design faculty, talk about de-constructing "concept" was inspiring to me. After spending the afternoon working on a an abstract concept model (not to scale, just shapes and inter-relationships, a loosy-goosy sort of thing), I learned just how abstract the process of conceptualizing can be. The first year graduate students were dealing with a way of deconstructing and reconstructing concept that was truly fascinating to me.

The assignment forced the students to look beyond their preconceived notions of concept and then turn out results that were beautiful and strikingly original. And in the systematic process, the result you might have thought was your solution gets destroyed (literally cut to shreds) and reassembled in a new way. Twice!!! The whole process repeats and you destroy the second solution, only to begin again (anew). The resulting output was fascinating to view and the process stunning to comprehend.

While intuition and pre-conception are often thought to be at the essence of creative thought, this exercise opens ones eyes to the possibility of process driving creativity. While I do think that the process can be made to enhance the result, there is still an intuitive assess/catalogue/analyze/assemble function (or series of functions) that is dependent upon the intuitive application of some principles of design. Why one solution derived from the process turns out better than another is solely dependent upon some "creative inspiration that comes from nothing."

To this day, this creative process is not able to be automated. For if design could be exclusively process driven, then robots could do it. And goodness knows lots of companies would prefer to have robots doing design; rather than the chaos and excitement, frustrations and triumphs, and the happy accidents that surround most of us creative types.

The efficiency experts might love it if automation could overtake the creative process. And then there would be the unhappy result of a world of uninspired solutions to design problems. A process driven sameness and monotony would overwhelm the senses like too much rich food overwhelms the digestion. Or like (supposedly) Tuscan inspired villas have overtaken Southern California. The resultant would be a clamor for unique solutions to separate "us" from "them" via unique expressions of personality and tres banal cliches of....

Wait! This already sounds so familiar. Did design get automated already? Did I miss something?