Strategygram: Start Where You Are Not

In the spring of 1907, when Pablo Picasso was visiting his American friend, the writer Gertrude Stein, at her home in Paris, the artist Henri Matisse dropped by.

Matisse had brought with him a Vili figurine—a tribal African sculpture, handcrafted in the Congo—that he had purchased en route to Stein’s home, from a curio shop specialising in non-Western artefacts.

Picasso was fascinated by the African sculpture and, according to Picasso’s lifelong friend, the poet Max Jacob, who was also present in Stein’s home that day, Picasso “clutched the small sculpture in his hands all night, inspired by its elongated features, streamlined forms and spiritual purpose.”

Matisse, too, was surprised by Picasso’s enchantment with the African sculpture. “We talked for a long time about it,” recalled Matisse, “and that was the beginning of our interest in Black [African] art, which we show in our paintings.”

A few days after the gathering in Stein’s home, Picasso proceeded to the Trocadero Museum of Ethnology—the?Palais du Trocadero—which displayed African masks and sculptures. “A smell of mould and neglect grabbed me by the throat,” said Picasso. “I was so depressed that I would have chosen to leave immediately. But I forced myself to stay, to examine these masks.”

That visit changed Picasso’s thinking. “And then I understood what painting really means,” he continued. “It is not an aesthetic process, it is a form of magic that stands between us and the hostile universe, a means of taking power, imposing a form on our terrors as well as our wishes. The day I understood that, I found my way.”??

Picasso returned from the Trocadero museum to his Montmarte studio, took out a composition that he had stored, and re-worked it using his new-found inspiration from the African artefacts. That seminal painting,?Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which depicts five nude women—the faces of the three women on the left influenced by Iberian sculptures and the two on the right drawing on African totem art—began what later came to be known as the Cubist movement.

African sculptures and masks are an art form that sharply contrasts with the realism and naturalism which had defined and dominated Western art until then and?Picasso’s exposure to a domain outside the paradigm within which he was working inflected his thinking.?It changed the way he conceptualised his paintings, creating innovative artistic solutions, many of which are closely associated with his fame.

Consider the concept of the meme, which Richard Dawkins put forward in his book?The Selfish Gene?in 1976.?

All of us today are familiar with memes circulating on the Internet—the cartoons, images, jokes, quotes, videos, and text messages that are copied or rehashed and then forwarded to other people online as an act of bonding through shared cultural experience.?

A meme is a unit of cultural information—an idea, a behaviour pattern, a style—that adapts and evolves as it responds to the pressures of competition and natural selection, while being transmitted from one person to another.

As Dawkins saw it, memes are the cultural equivalent of our biological genes, with memes spurring cultural evolution just as our genes engender biological evolution. Dawkins even coined the term ‘meme’ because it is a one-syllable word like ‘gene’ and is phonetically similar.

Where did Richard Dawkins get his inspiration from? As in the case of Picasso, Dawkins’s?thinking was sparked by the work of people outside his field:?the work of geneticist L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, anthropologist F. T. Cloak, and ethologist J. M. Cullen.?

As in the case of Picasso, Dawkins’s?thinking was sparked by the work of people outside his field

Take Issey Miyake (whose original name was Miyake Kazumaru). “There are few designers whose names have become so synonymous with fashion innovation as Issey Miyake, the Japanese artist who built his reputation on sharp pleating, avant garde cuts, and signature fragrances,” noted?Time?magazine on August 9, 2022.

The magazine went so far as to select him, in its August 23-30, 1999 issue, as one of the ‘100 Most Influential Asians of the 20th Century’, alongside Mahatma Gandhi, Mao Zedong, the Dalai Lama, and Emperor Hirohito.?

Issey Miyake, who died recently, repeatedly broke through the conventions of fashion—he disliked the term ‘fashion’ being applied to his creations, preferring his artistry to be called ‘design’—by drawing inspiration from realms outside it, whether that be from a sculptor, a potter, an architect, a furniture designer, a choreographer, a photographer, or a computer scientist.

Issey Miyake’s?monozukuri,?or way of making things, involved continuous collaborations and experimentation. He came up with the idea—as far back as 1976—of the A-POC, or ‘A Piece of Cloth’, line where, working with a computer expert, just one thread was fed into a computer-programmed industrial weaving machine and out came a single tube of fabric, allowing the customer to cut the cloth to make a jersey that fits his or her shape, without any sewing or waste of fabric.?

His Bao Bao bag drew its inspiration from architect Frank Gehry’s daring design of interconnected shapes of stone, glass, and titanium for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, so much so that Miyake’s bag was called the Bilbao when it was launched in 2000 (and re-branded a decade later with its nickname, the Bao Bao).

“The Bao Bao bag is designed to evoke geometric wonder,” said?Time?magazine on August 9, 2022, while?The Guardian, on June 7, 2020 opined that “first and foremost, it is an amazing piece of engineering.”?

The Bao Bao bag is made of mesh fabric on top of which are small, interlocking triangles of polyvinyl that shift and adjust, morphing the bag’s outer shape as the wearer fills the bag with personal items, or walks about with it, or sets the bag down, with the bag all the while uniquely staying true to Gehry’s notion of exploring ‘shapes made by chance’.

What Issey Miyake did was?employ engineering to evoke emotion, evolving empathy into enjoyment.

What Issey Miyake did was?employ engineering to evoke emotion, evolving empathy into enjoyment.?“Certain people think that the definition of design is the beauty of the useful, but in my own work,” he said, “I want to integrate feelings, emotion. You have to put life into it.”

When a Cupertino-based company introduced its new range of personal computers in 1998—the first product launch after the co-founder returned to take the reins of the faltering company—at the forefront of its mind was?empathy that evokes emotion.??

Not only was the product easy to set up, because the monitor and computer were integrated into one unit, but the computer was astonishingly?pretty.?It came in a translucent, teal colour—named Bondi Blue, after the Australian beach known for its surfing (a subtle reference to the principal use that customers would want the computer for: Internet surfing)—that made the product stand out from all its bland, beige-coloured, box-ish would-be competitors.?

That meticulous attention to design detail made the computer appear friendly through features such as a comely circular mouse, a “grapefruit” product shape, and a handle.

The computer had a handle, not because anyone would want to carry a desktop with a handle, but because it helped neutralise the fear that people had about using computers. “Back then, people weren’t comfortable with technology,” the company’s celebrated chief designer explained. “If you’re scared of something, then you won’t touch it. I could see my mum being scared to touch it. So I thought, if there’s this handle on it, it makes a relationship possible. It’s approachable. It’s intuitive. It gives you permission to touch. It gives a sense of its deference to you.”

Less than a year later, five bright, candy-coloured models were added—blueberry, strawberry, lime, tangerine, and grape—prompting a reporter from?The New York Times?to remark that the models “more closely resemble a pack of Life Savers than a new computer line.”

The result? Six weeks after the product’s initial launch, the company announced it was once again profitable. And a week after the candy-coloured range was introduced, the company reported that its quarterly earnings were triple those of a year earlier. Perhaps equally significant was that thirty percent of the product’s sales were accounted for by people buying their first computer. The friendly computer had trumped fear. Empathy, Engineering, Emotion.?

Empathy, Engineering, Emotion.?

The inspiration for this path-setting product once again came from outside the category. The company’s chief designer had asked himself: “What computer would The Jetsons have had?”?

Imagine designing a computer using an animated cartoon series as the source stimulus. Would you do that? But that’s what this company did to change the conventions of the category.?

“We could make a computer look like a grapefruit,” the chief designer’s mind answered.?

At the product’s launch conference, the company’s iconic chief executive declared: “It looks like it’s from another planet. And a good planet—a planet with better designers.…The back of this thing looks better than the front of the other guys’.”

Using stimuli from outside the problem’s domain?right from the start—that’s the important bit: right from the start—when you want a breakthrough solution may seem illogical but the method is practical and powerful. Stimuli that is unconnected with the domain you are working within, knocks you off the traditional solution track.??

In the physical world, it makes sense to start from where you are, but in the conceptual world, it does not. When you start from a place that is logically associated with the problem and is within the zone of the domain’s associations, you are likely to go down a conventional path and come up with customary solutions.?

When you start from an unconnected place, outside the logic bubble of the problem and the domain in which it resides, you are likely to go down an unconventional path and come up with novel solutions.?

On the other hand,?when you start from an unconnected place, outside the logic bubble of the problem and the domain in which it resides, you are likely to go down an unconventional path and come up with novel solutions.?

When you want a breakthrough solution, don’t start where you are.?Start where you are not.

Sattar Khan

This Strategygram titled ‘Start Where You Are Not’ is part of the series I’ve created where each Strategygram condenses one strategic thought into one image.?

The series is a visual guide to strategic thinking and provides handy image prompts for brand strategy workouts.??

#strategygrams ?#visualthinking ?#branddifferentiation #brandstrategy #brandexperience #clarity ?#visualstorytelling #story #strategy #strategist ?