Weekly Notes #2 - On the arts and the progress
DON’T GIVE UP ON THE ARTS YET
”I was trembling. I thought, if I do not open the door at once and get out of here, I am lost. But I knew I could not open the door, I knew it was too late; soon it was too late to do anything but moan. He pulled me against him, putting himself into my arms as though he were giving me himself to carry, and slowly pulled me down with him to that bed. With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.”
Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin, 1956
On Thursday, I went to see Giovanni’s room in the International Theater Amsterdam. Based on James Baldwin’s eponymous novel, the play explores David’s wrestle against his latent homosexuality, in parallel with a romance with a young Parisian man, Giovanni, a romantic at heart, a hound of the streets. I thought about how one’s choices - or lack thereof - never exist in isolation, and weakness or ignorance is not enough excuse to rinse yourself of the pain caused to others. David cannot come to terms with his sexuality and he is visibly struggling to reconcile his love for Giovanni with his fraternal love for his fiancee Hella; and at the same time he cannot feel anything but disgust for both of them and himself.
There are many factors at play, like race and social class and cultural divides and also gendered roles. At the same time, the play was so beautifully crafted that we were able to feel the irremediable impulses of David, to feel the heartbreak of Giovanni. David feels as burdened by the love received as much as he does by the constraints of appearances and by society; Giovanni cannot fathom a life without love; money he doesn’t need, but the warmth of another human, he can. And so Giovanni can never be truly happy, he can never truly relish in the love of another, because he cannot develop feelings for the subject; whereas Giovanni is so obsessed with the object that the subject is just a natural extension.
That same morning, I had read that the San Francisco ballet received an anonymous donation of 600 million dollars last summer, and its director Tamara Rojo (the first ever spanish female director of the institution), said it helped them create more freely, be independent, and unleash non-mainstream plays and acts. It also helped them fund more cultural education programs and roadshows in schools and universities, as well as giving grants to kids from underrepresented background to go study dance at her school. This anonymous donation not only helped unleash new artistic directions but made dance, and hence culture, available to the low classes.
Lately, I am concerned with technofeudalism and how technology can be a total disease for democracy and equal development - as threatening as unregulated capitalism. I have been pondering about an antidote to this despair, or utopian reality that seems to be upon us. Perhaps during that play I thought that art, manifestations of emotion and humane stories, and performance or realization as a medium, can teach and reach audiences like those kids the SF ballet is trying to reach. Is the response to aggressive tech misinformation and monitoring, offline artistic manifestations? Can both coexist?
In America, most artistic institutions are funded privately, while Europeans have traditionally relied on public funding. However, European governments have recently pressured arts organizations to build a mixed-income model, and to decrease their dependence on the government. Are we really ready to give up the arts, too? See what happens when you leave sectors unregulated, unsupported, mercy to the private market (i.e tech). Will we also give up what makes us humans, what makes us connect and appreciate beauty and celebrate aesthetic? Relying on private funding leaves nonprofit and artists vulnerable to the whims of donors - and to their values. What are we willing to give up on?
LACK OF PROGRESS IS THE ENEMY
Everytime I feel stagnant, which happens more than I’d like, I revisit notebooks, personal journals or correspondence from people I look up to. Lately, I have been thinking of a design team like a kitchen: chefs, sous chefs and waiters willing to make the dining experience an exquisite one. This kind of magic that transpires in the seating room of a fine dining restaurant, where everything is organised and orchestrated through an invisible dance happening in the background, without pirouettes. My former boss used to tell me that we could work like recipe developers to create something new. Take the ingredients, and the dish is there, but it needs to be cooked with grace.
Since that metaphor I started thinking of the design process and the innovation journey like putting together a new recipe or creating a song from scratch. You need to play with the notes, the fragrances, the voices and the flavours and the textures. You might not get it at the first time. You might not have all the ingredients you want, or you might have to work with only local or seasonal ingredients. The pieces might not fit at once, or you need a piano and you cannot play the piano. That’s alright - constraints fuel resourcefulness, resourcefulness is based on creativity. The foundational tenets of design.
I picked up Work In Progress, the world-famous chef René Redzepi's intimate journal containing notes from a year in the life of noma. He comes back from a month-long vacation and wants to get back into the mood; innovation has been feeling scarce and the team is dispersed after a high-success period. The journal recalls the creative processes at noma and the challenges faced by its chefs over a twelve-month period in an unspecified year of the restaurant's history, written and time stamped by René Himself. Being inside of this man’s head is madness, and also a gift.
It’s highly refreshing to see someone thinking at such high level and taking himself seriously. There is a level of grit, optimism and determination that takes over all the pages, even if René himself is swearing all over the paragraphs and telling the reader how tired he is, how little he slept, how grumpy he’s feeling. And yet, the mysticism of a genius’ process invites you to re-consider how the fuck you do things, and why your day to day isn’t submerged in this special magic he is living, creating in noma.
I am just halfway through the journal but there’s something that stuck with me and that I’ve been putting into practice lately. He explains that his sous chefs were frustrated for a while not because of lack of stimulus or results, but lack of progress. In one of the entries, he reflects on the low mood even despite a successful period of great reviews and ratings. Simply because ratings are an outcome of their work, but not an indicator of progress towards certain goal - maximum creativity, in their case. The chefs are not just aiming to get 5 stars straight every year, but to push the boundaries of what is possible, regardless of the outcome. They are about enjoying the process, the craft, and innovation - not only about tables booked. Intrinsic motivation and grit for the craft, over numerical validation. That, in Renés account, is real progress.
When progress is abstract, or missing, people get disappointed and stagnant. So I have been asking myself, how can we show progress? How can we track progress and celebrate it and use it to guide us? What is, and how do we define, progress? Having more meetings doesn’t equal progress, neither it is having more and more reviews over the same hypothesis. Too many people involved in decision making can create progress blockers, for example. On the other hand, wrong choices over and over can really, really slow down any progress at all.
So I created a matrix to hold mine and teams’ projects and initiatives, as well as my own work development. These frameworks should already exist in your brain the way they work for you, but it is always helpful to refine it by defining the categories and what matters to you most. For example, I consider that projects that display or achieve tangible, visible outcomes week over week (outcomes doesn’t mean a certain metric yet - it can be churning out a good prototype or committing with product on what to put on the roadmap) AND have some element of MAGIC are top priority for me. Magic here means it is quality crafted, it has this je-ne-sais-quoi to it - the feeling of good design and a thoughtful experience design.
I put both dimensions in objection but they are not necessarily competing one against the other. In reality, tangible means that problem is known and solution clear so we are getting closer and seeing results; magic means that the execution of the solution is smooth and intuitive. You can have magic without tangibility, but it will be a pretty design only. You can have tangibility by doing a small CRO hack, but there won’t be any magic achieved, and magic is the defining factor of a good experience.
You can see that ‘Getting there’ and ‘Foundational’ do eventually transform in ‘Genius Zone’, which moves us forward. But these have to move in a period no longer than one or two weeks. If you cannot move it, or moving it causes zero tangibility, or magic remains stuck, then you might as well drop it in the ‘Energy Drain Hole’. These are totally abstract and probably only work for me, but the exercise of defining what progress means and what to drop when it’s not being achieved is self-reflection exercise.
For example, I have been working on exploring problem X for two weeks now. I gathered all the data, mixed qual and quant, checked all the hypothesis were true and arrived to its root causes. It was in ‘Getting there’ as the problem was a little uncertain, still. Now I know what the problem/challenge has been all along, the problem that causes project X to be resolved, because its dragging our metrics. However, I am now only focusing on the solutions that can bring MAGIC, or the smooth solution. There are solutions I need to drop or de-prioritize because the opportunity size is questionable. But I still want to move it forward a little bit. So my mission this day is to move project X into genius zone by focusing on what will make progress tangible there, and how can I manifest the magic of solving it through design and consumer-led experience. Et voila, my own framework in motion!
READING, WATCHING, LISTENING TO
Giovanni’s Room at the ITA - We had seats 22, 24 for a very affordable price and could see the stage and english subtitles well enough. Go see it!
This color palette combinations by mymind
Rachel Kobetz’s progress weekly reflection - In hindsight, I think Rachel’s reflection got stuck in my head and led me to reflect on progression. My reflective practices different than hers but I appreciated the post.
I enjoyed this interview from StylelikeU to Mara Hoffman, CEO of eponymous sustainable fashion brand, which closed its doors last year. There is something very magnetic about her and also very humbling. Despite some woo-woo, privilege-talk things, I enjoyed her honesty and openness about herself, her business, and her relationships with other humans.
Cameron Tonkinwise smart comment about OpenAI Research pilot. I had a conversation recently about how technical autocracy is not yet in the public eye and how the next wave of control and monitoring seems to be happening in the dark. Something to keep an eye out for and to sharpen our critical thinking towards.
A podcast by Vox about paying attention and how our attention is the currency of our day to day
Image -> The Singel Bridge at the Paleisstraat in Amsterdam by George Hendrik Breitner (1857–1923), oil on canvas, 1896; reworked 1898. Breitner often took photographs to prepare his paintings, and several such studies are known for this work as one can feel and touch the movement of a picture within the painting - the MAGIC. The way in which the woman walks straight towards us and the image is cropped strikes one as distinctly photographic. Breitner initially depicted the woman as a maid, but after a negative review, the gallery representing him felt it would be better if he made her into an elegant lady.
If you read this – give me your feedback please! Write to candelamartinezd@gmail.com
