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Simplicity is never a goal; it is a by-product of a good idea and modest expectations.

Paul Rand, From Lascaux to Brooklyn

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Paul Arden says: "What is a good idea? One that happens is. If it doesn't, it isn't."

Is this egg drop a failure, or a success? (via xkcd)

It's Monday, and as we're all getting ready to start our weeks, getting ready to start working on our products, or with our clients – anyway, going out there and designing stuff – I'm going to try to keep it short and sweet. What I'm going to do specifically is lay a little aphorism on you, which I hope you'll think about as you go about your business. Here it is:

The way we talk about design changes what design is.

And if that's too Zen or Heideggerian for you, let's get practical. Why are all of our clients coming to us now talking about the power of social networking? It's because we've been talking about it for so long. Thousands upon thousands of blog posts have for years now been extolling the virtues of tribe-building, grass-roots social marketing, and the post-brand branding strategies to business decision makers.

And all the talking worked. Now, non-designers and non-technorati have been convinced that indeed the social media revolution has changed the way all of these important design activities need to be conducted, and have done so, I believe, swept up in a fervor emergent from the blog-level discussions of designers and technology advocates.

You can draw a parallel to most social phenomena here: from green design revolution to the French Revolution. These things took off precisely because people kept giving reasons why they should, compelling others until critical mass was reached.

If the way we talk about things influences the way things are, then every blog post is a vote: A vote for one of the possible ways that design could be. And if we don't just love the current state of the nation, we need to be casting our votes every day for the future shape of the discipline.

Adaptive Path's weekly "signposts" post pointed me to a Harvard Business Review article written by Pixar president Ed Catmull about creativity. And boy howdy, it is a gem. Below, I quote it often and at length, not (solely) because I am lazy, but because paraphrasing it would be a violent disservice to its pithy creative insight.

Its principle thesis is that there is a common and crucial misunderstanding about the nature of creativity that exaggerates the importance of the initial idea in creating an original product. And while this idea perhaps simply recapitulates the famous Edisonian encomium to work, it does so with some pretty damn compelling market proof: Pixar studios.

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