David Edwards - Creating Things That Matter: The Art and Science of Innovations That Last

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To Aurlie, Jrme, Raphal, and Thierry

M ost things we create will not matter. T his book is about creating things that do. It is about how we create things that bring enduring value to the planet.

We get the general idea of creating when we build our first sandcastle. Write our first short story in school. Tell our first convenient lie. Creating for our own purposes turns out to be an easy matter. It is when we create value for others over a long time that we evoke the idea of the sublime.

Creating very new things that durably matter is one of the most difficult things we may ever attempt. The process looks radically unlike the cutthroat stereotype of innovation success. Empathy counts more than selfishness, innocence more than experience, aesthetic intelligence more than engineering brilliance, and humility more than arrogance.

By aesthetic characteristics more commonly associated with artistic expression or creative play, artists, scientists, engineers, designers, entrepreneurs, and other creators pioneer frontiers, discover, and occasionally create things that change how we live and think.

Aesthetics matterwhat seems not to matter is precisely what does.

Aesthetics are the ways of the mindfully engaged creator and the qualities of the remarkable created thing, like the Sistine Chapel or quantum mechanics. By aesthetics, art and science each advance frontiers, and in the exploration of the unknown, these famous opposites become the same.

Experiential aesthetics has roots in the social, technological, and cultural upheavals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce wrote in his Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic that the common definition of aesthetics, as a set of principles defining the meaning of beauty, had lost meaning. It was nonsense to define beauty in painting, sculpture, architecture, dance, and other art forms by fixed rules amended by continual corrections. Aesthetics related more obviously to process than to outcome. According to Croce, it made art and science one. The American philosopher and educator John Dewey, in his Art as Experience , carried the argument further. Beautiful forms successfully express sensitive human experience. Anything might be beautiful. A novel, a dance, a bridge. The more universal the experience, the more associated with the very long arc of human existence, the more a finely achieved expression, or creation, seems to be art.

Creating Things That Matter is about how we can learn to create this way, what it means to each of us personally, and why it promotes the creating of a world we actually want to live in. It is about how we observe, dream, and act in a way exemplified by the practices of some of our most notable creatorsa process that is at once new to our boardrooms and business schools and as old as humanity itself.

Dad was bigger than any father I knew. As long as we lived together, I was in awe of him. The electric trains I received for my birthday never entertained me as much as they did when he came into the basement to spend an afternoon with me building fantastic mountains our trains could climb and colorful villages they could meander through. The tomato I carried onto the porch with a shaker of pepper didnt taste nearly so good as it did when he walked out there with me and showed me how to sprinkle and bite, sprinkle and bite, with red juice running down our chins.

When my dad sat down to watch a football game, I instantly wanted to do the same, and when he roared with pleasure or fury, I roared too.

He loved to teach, and I suspected his students to be like a second family to him. It worried me a little. Whenever he invited his students into our house, I watched them carefully, as if some of my dad had rubbed off on them and not me, and by close observation, I might gather up these missing parts and be made whole. Once, when I was thirteen, he spoke over the phone to a student about a chemistry problem. The conversation went on and on, right there in the center of our kitchen where my mom sometimes made delicious chocolate chip cookies, and behind her back, my dad would snatch for us globs of dough. It was exasperating to me, this nonfamily chemistry talk. Stop! I yelled. I couldnt stand the idea that there was this piece of my dad I couldnt have.

He was my dad. He was mine and he was incomparable. Next to him I felt empowered, yet I also felt alone, as if I stood next to a brilliant warm sun that sometimes blinded me. When I left home, my dad and I saw each other less frequently. After college, grad school, and postgraduate studies, where I improbably moved from a community college to MIT, I started to travel, to do very new sorts of things, and discover worlds that my dad didnt know. I moved to Paris and opened my lab to the public, calling it Le Laboratoire, where I staged wild exhibitions that explored questions like the meaning of now with the South African artist William Kentridge, and flash culinary sensations with the French designer Philippe Starck.

One day in the midst of all this, I was invited into a radio studio for an interview. It was a rainy day, and I recall entering the studio on rue de Clry with wet jeans and a distracted mind. Two technicians greeted me at the door, ushered me into a tiny room, and set me before a thick microphone. They placed a heavy headset over my ears. I heard a voice, deep and familiar. The NPR journalist, based in Atlanta, asked me if Id like to sing. I laughed. What a question, I thought. No, I said, I had no singing talent at all, to which the man replied, Neither does my wife, and yet you just asked her to sing. His wife happened to be visiting Paris. She had experienced an exhibition at Le Laboratoire called Vocal Vibrations and had just phoned him from the Charles de Gaulle Airport. How amazing, I said. I hope she enjoyed it, but I still wont sing for you. We both laughed, and I opened up as Im sure he supposed I would.

Midway along, the journalist asked me if I had a single person to thank most for my creativity. I thought about it. Yes, it was my dad.

He asked me what secret my dad had shared with me.

He had done one thing, I replied, and it had changed me forever. My dad got down on the floor and played with me. We made up games with toy soldiers and invented together. Lying there on the cold cement, we were collaborators, a kid and his dad, cocreators of things that mattered.

I choked up. Nothing like this had ever happened to me. Here I was before a complete stranger in the middle of an interview. It was crazy. This journalist had somehow gotten to the core of me. In the sound booth, I had gone back to creating with my father in the basement of our tiny suburban house, and it hurt me to have to leave.

Recollections like these can be powerful, all the more as childhood creation differs so fundamentally from how we create later on. As kids, we create a story, a toy house, or a personality, mindful and imaginative, with little clear idea of what our project will become. This adventurous approachor third wayto creating often gets sidelined as soon as we enter school, where we learn to advance along one of the two standard paths of contemporary creation, the commercial and cultural paths, with their regulations and constraints.