On Collaboration: The Market Won’t Settle for Anything Less Than Art
It’s become popular these days to stir up visions of uniqueness, expression, and individualism. I want to encourage you that the expression of creativity will only happen if you eliminate boundaries. I’m not talking going outside the box, but going to the edge of the box and standing on top. You must have something to base your idea on. Art flourishes within an environment of collaboration where people bring their individual and diverse experiences together.
Digital media is offering a chance to make real connections and gain insights from people you’d never have a chance to interact with any other way. If you can touch or change the people you work with, you will gain influence, authority, power, and most importantly, a mutual trust.
The old way of doing things was to use competitive business analysis to drive your market. Thanks to digital media, overconfident entrepreneurs, naïve investors, confused scientists and aggressive venture capitalists– we can think of art as a tool to translate experiences into an emotional feeling when facing a new problem. The consumer is seeking beautiful everyday experiences. Based on a knack for deep understanding of the culture,
art is a platform that can change everything and connect emotionally if it’s rooted in reality, logic, knowledge and experience.
In my new favorite book Linchpin, Seth Godin definitions the three elements of art.
1. Art is made by a human being
2. Art is created to have an impact, to change someone else
3. Art is a gift. You can sell the souvenir, the canvas, the recording but the idea itself is free, and the generosity is a critical part of making art.
Why not start with the question, “What if…?” Ask your client to dig deeper how they feel about a design and art as story about their product or service.
Collaborate and do something unique this week. Art has the rare skill of actually getting things done; create the outcome that people seek out well into the future.
March 21st, 2010 at 6:45 am
Although entrepreneurs may tell you, “the reason I got into my own business is to make money,” It’s rare that I hear that. Most business owners chose to go into business to: free themselves from tyranny, chart their own course, express themselves, create an environment that’s conducive to progress, improvement, advancement, etc. Not unlike many of the motivating factors of the artist. Art is indeed “made by a human being.”The committee, however, becomes something less. They take on a collective mind and lose its authentic purpose – to choose by looking at the same problem (and possible solutions) through varying perspectives. When a business is run by financial controls only, half the purpose of its existence is lost. Culture advances through ideas alone. Art is the idea generating machine that lives in the basement because of low self esteem.