Nothing so fundamental lies in the realm of concern to us aggregate humans, where the need is, now, for the study of real complexity, not idealized simplicity. In every field except high-energy physics on one hand, and cosmology on the other, one hears the same. The immense understanding that has come from digging deeper to atomic explanations has been followed by a realization that this leaves out something essential. In its rapid advance, science has had to ignore the fact that a whole is more than the sum of its parts.
In a natural landscape, each element is part of the greater whole, a sophisticated and intricate web of connections and energy flows. If we attempt to create landscapes using a strictly objective viewpoint, we will produce awkward and dysfunctional designs because all living systems are more than just a sum of their parts. Our culture has tried to define the landscape scientifically, by collecting extensive data about its parts.
These methods are much like the group of blind mullahs in the Sufi tale, who try to describe an elephant.
The way designers and developers work together today is broken. It’s too siloed and separate; “collaboration” is a fantasy that few enjoy.
The state of advertising in the 1940s was similar. All of that changed when copywriter Bill Bernbach met art director Paul Rand. Their collaborative working style led to the birth of the idea of “the creative team,” the mutual respect and partnership between art director and copywriter that tended to yield unique results. Bob Gage, an art director that worked for DDB, the agency Bernbach co-founded, described it like this:
“Two people who respect each other sit in the same room for a length of time and arrive at a state of free association, where the mention of one idea will lead to another idea, then to another. The art director might suggest a headline, the writer a visual. The entire ad is conceived as a whole, in a kind of ping pong between disciplines.”
Isn’t that what we all strive for in our jobs? True collaboration with equals and partners? Ideas that build off one another? Why does this seem so far away for some of us?
One summer morning, the beginning of July, I got this long letter from my girlfriend, and in it she’d written that she wanted to break up with me. I’ve always felt close to you, and I still like you even now, and I’m sure that from here on I’ll continue to…et cetera, et cetera. In short, she was wanting to break it off. She had found herself a new boyfriend.
I hung my head and smoked six cigarettes, went outside and drank a can of beer, came back in and smoked another cigarette. Then I took three HB pencils I had on my desk and snapped them in half. It wasn’t that I was angry, really. I just didn’t know what to do. In the end, I merely changed clothes and headed off to work. And for a while there, everyone within shouting distance was commenting on my suddenly “outgoing disposition”. What is it about life?