iwritewordsgood:

Bruce Mau’s advice for approaching projects, edited by me to make it a faster read.

1. Be willing to grow. Experience events and let them change you.

2. Forget good. Good is a known quantity. We all agree on good. It isn’t necessarily good. If you stick to good you’ll never have growth.

3. Process matters more than outcome. When outcome drives process we go where we already were. When process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we know we want to be there.

4. Love your experiments as you would an ugly child. Joy drives growth. Cast your work as beautiful experiments, iterations and mistakes. Allow yourself the fun of failure each day.

5. Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you’ll discover something valuable.

6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers. Ask different questions.

7. Study. A studio is a place of study. Use production as an excuse to study.

8. Drift. Wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.

9. Begin anywhere. Not knowing where to start is a common form of paralysis.

10. Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Let it emerge. Let anyone lead. Follow when it makes sense.

11. Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment. Applications need critical rigor. Produce more ideas than applications.

12. Keep moving. The market and its operations reinforce success. Resist it. Let failure and migration be part of your practice.

13. Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames. Surprising opportunities may appear.

14. Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from those limits.

15. Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Explore the answer, not the question. Imagine learning all your life at the rate of an infant.

16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight and vast creative potential.

17. ____________________. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for ideas you haven’t had yet, and other people’s ideas.

18. Stay up late. Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard and you’re separated from the rest of the world.

19. Work the metaphor. Every object can stand for something other than what’s apparent. Work on what it stands for.

20. Take risks. Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. What you produce today will create your future.

21. Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.

22. Make your own tools. Hybridize tools to build unique objects. Even simple tools you make can yield new avenues of exploration. Tools extend our capacity, so even small tools can make big difference.

23. Stand on someone’s shoulders. You can travel farther on the accomplishments of those who came before you, plus the view is a lot better.

24. Avoid software. The problem with software is everybody has it.

25. Don’t clean your desk. You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.

26. Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. They’re bad for you.

27. Read only left-hand pages. Marshall McLuhan did it. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for our “noodle.”

28. Make new words. Expand the lexicon. New conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. New expression generates new conditions.

29. Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.

30. Organization = Liberty. Real innovation happens in context, usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. The myth of a split between creatives and suits is what Leonard Cohen calls a ‘charming artifact of the past.’ 31. Don’t borrow money. Maintaining financial control lets us maintain creative control. It’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline and how many have failed. 32. Listen carefully. Every collaborator brings a more strange complex world than any we could imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will be the same.

33. Take field trips. The world’s bandwidth is greater than your TV’s or the Internet’s or even an immersive, dynamically rendered, computer simulated environment.

34. Make mistakes faster.

35. Imitate. Don’t be shy. Get close. You’ll never there and the separation might be cool. Look at Richard Hamilton’s version of Duchamp’s to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is.

36. Scat. When you forget the words, make up something else … but not words.

37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.

38. Explore the other edge. Great liberty exists when we don’t run with the technological pack. We can’t find the edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Us old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle that’s still rich with potential.

39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Growth doesn’t always happen where we think. Hans Obrist organized a science/art conference with parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals, but no conference. It was hugely successful.

40. Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries try to control the wilding of creative life. They are understandable efforts to order manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump fences and cross fields.

41. Laugh. I use laughter as a barometer of how comfortably we’re expressing ourselves.

42. Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is novelty. History gives growth direction, but every memory is a degraded image of the past. That makes us aware of its quality as a past, not a present, so every memory is a new construct different from its source and potential for growth itself.

43. Power to the people. People can only play when they feel they have control over their lives. We can’t be free-agents if we’re not free.