OPTICAL CLARITY: OUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND’S BUSY EYE

“What I have propounded will (in good time) revolutionize the world of Physical & Metaphysical Science. I say this calmly – but I say it.” —Edgar Allan Poe, 1848

In my last column, I touched upon how the universe itself can flow through your designer mind and manifest itself in your artifacts. This may sound like I’ve had my hand in the Acapulco Gold–infused cookie jar, but the more I look into this, the more I believe it—and by the time you finish reading this article, there’s a chance you will too!

Cerebral Supernova

History is filled with examples of how the human mind can achieve amazing things through the power of osmosis, the process of gradual or unconscious assimilation of ideas and knowledge. Just as our subconscious mind makes us breathe automatically, it is also an incredible intake of information more powerful than a 747 jet engine. Simply by walking the earth we’re absorbing information at an astounding rate and storing it for that precise moment when it’s needed for our next great design, potentially unlocking quantum breakthroughs unimaginable only moments before.

What if the human mind were actually a cosmic portal for information from unknown forces in the universe to flow through? Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in eastern Tennessee are trying to open a portal to a parallel universe; actual cold hard cash is being spent on it. Leah Broussard, the physicist leading the team, told NBC that the experiment is “pretty wacky” but could prove that what we see with our eyes is only half the story. More interesting to us designers is that we may be capable of absorbing and using only half of this already halved palette of visuals, because so much of our brain runs as a background application, hidden away in the system files of our cerebral hard drive.

Are we denied access to true innovation potential because our conscious mind is constantly saying no, telling us to proceed with caution or even stop? What if we were better able to recognize the fleeting moments of brilliance as they desperately vie for our distracted attention before we are toppled from the sharp tip of Maslow’s pyramid down into the cloud of self-doubt and fear? After all, designers only spend about 10% of their time designing things; the rest is spent verifying, proving and presenting what we have designed, hedging bets and reducing risks.

Malcom Gladwell writes in his book Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking about the Getty Museum and its accidental purchase of a fake ancient Greek statue. Despite overwhelming scientific and historical evidence, including carbon dating and other technological analysis stating that the statue was real, art experts could tell at a glance that it was a fake based on nothing more than the idea that it didn’t look right. By accessing the day-to-day gathering of visual stimuli stored in their minds, the art experts could—at a glance with only a split second of info gathering—see beyond and outperform very expensive tools designed to minimize risk.

When you look at the artist, the creative writer, the musician, you have to ask why these people chase expression with such fervor. There is no certainty of reward or payback of any kind; in fact, there is high probability of failure. So difficult is this path that these people are labeled as tortured, starving and struggling. The other common adjective applied to them is sensitive—in most cases sensitivity being their defining characteristic. We’re not talking about crying at weddings; we’re talking about people who are hypersensitive to the input and data that the world (and the universe) is throwing at us constantly—information most people discard as unnecessary. According to Eric Jaffe, a former behavioral science editor at FastCo.Design, “Creative people often experience a disorder called cognitive disinhibition, or a failure to filter out the useless information one encounters in the world.” On the flip side, Jaffe notes that while some experience pain that others are shielded from due to their “useless-info” filters, “this sensitivity often makes the creative mind of the artist [or designer] much more fertile.”

Is the universe trying to speak through these hypersensitive people? Are they being driven not by a simple desire to create artifacts that address more than the conscious mind’s concerns, but instead by a dire need to do so—an almost life and death struggle as if there is no other possible path? Are they somehow being pulled down this tortured road instinctually by forces we do not understand? Einstein famously said, “The mysterious is the source of all true art and science.” Is raw, unfiltered creativity actually a message that cannot be expressed through spoken words, but one that is so compelling and powerful that it must be expressed nonetheless, therefore tormenting its messengers? Perhaps so. The reward the artist seeks for this effort is the knowledge that they have communicated the enigmatic in a language unknown to man and at the whip hand of forces unknown to even themselves.

Osmosis Full Throttle

One of the most fascinating examples of osmotic info gathering that I have ever come across is that of the poet Edgar Allan Poe. He is fondly remembered by history as the dark lord of the macabre, the master craftsman of the mystique. His Tell-Tale Heart and The Raven are emblazoned in the annals of great literary works alongside Huckleberry Fin and Catcher in the Rye. What people don’t know about Poe is that by using the powers of observation, deep thinking and the miracles that writers encounter when they are in the blissful state of creative flow, he pre-discovered the Big Bang, black holes and the secrets behind the formation of the universe—just by writing a 150-page prose poem! More startling, he did so 74 years before the first person with any scientific background whatsoever proposed similar theories and a full 113 years before these theories were substantiated by math. He knew nothing about science, astrophysics and cosmology, and yet he knew everything.

In his 1848 literary work Eureka, Poe speculates that the universe began with the explosion of one “primordial particle” whose exploding bits were and still are infinitely expanding. He also was the first person on record to solve Olbers’ paradox, the mystery of why the sky is dark at night. This entertaining and popular poet somehow was the first to postulate that the universe is finite in terms of its space and distance, and therefore, light from the other stars that is visible while our sun is hidden in the Earth’s shadow is too far away to illuminate anything—that this light from these faraway stars has not yet reached us. This is a poet with little to no scientific training—only a backyard astronomer at best. These concepts were unknown in 1848 and were greeted as pure nonsense by his fans and critics.

Poe’s Eureka was obscure compared to his wildly popular ghost stories of the supernatural, his pre-scientific discoveries dismissed and mocked perhaps because he also spun yarns of beating hearts beneath floorboards. Eureka was a commercial flop too, and yet Poe was certain that his theories were correct. In the book he writes, ''What I have propounded will (in good time) revolutionize the world of Physical & Metaphysical Science. I say this calmly — but I say it.” To put his statement another way, Poe was saying, “You can bet your ass I’m right.” It wasn’t until 1922 that the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann gleaned from Einstein's equations that the universe is indeed expanding just as Poe said it was in Eureka some 74 years earlier. Who was Friedman’s favorite author? You guessed it. Edgar Allan Poe.

Scientific enlightenment in this case may have been inspired by art and imagination, not the other way around. Tom Siegfried points out in his book Strange Matters: Undiscovered Ideas at the Frontiers of Space and Time that unlike Leonardo da Vinci’s pre-discovery of the helicopter during the Renaissance or Jules Verne’s descriptions of the submarine and television decades before their existence—human inventions that awaited technology—“Poe’s pre-discoveries were insights into the very nature of reality.” How and why did Poe write such a book? Many believe he was championing the artistic over the scientific with his mocking of the names of famous scientists in the work, for example, calling Aristotle “Ares Tottle.” Perhaps Eureka is a pantser-style writer’s work where a pure, unplanned brain-dump produced truths that were unfathomable by the conscious, rational mind of the day. Like Jackson Pollack’s impossible-to-counterfeit drip paintings, perhaps the universe found a way to flow through Edgar Allan Poe’s mind and manifest itself on his written pages.

Information Super-Combine

How do we harvest information that is absorbed by the sensitive subconscious mind? Looking back at Einstein, he was much more than a genius scientist whose achievements emerged from a chalkboard choked in calculus equations. He was a philosopher who was expert in describing the human condition. His greatest achievements came from what he called “Thought Experiments,” exercises he used to learn about reality just by thinking about notions that are counterfactual. Were Einstein’s initial impulses and motivations the same as Edgar Allen Poe’s? Were Poe and Einstein being driven by the same whip hand that drives the tormented artist to communicate the noncommunicable?

The design industry on the other hand tends to look for a sure thing, a process that can be explained to our clients assuring them that innovation is as guaranteed as the results from a carbon dating machine. Our improvements are usually incremental, and unfortunately that is more than enough to justify a place on the shelf, making our contributions more about capitalism than they are about innovation. We conduct our interviews, film our users and write our problem statements to minimize risk. At some point, though, sheer, raw, unjustified and unexplainable imagination—or designer “Thought Experiments”—are the only stones left unturned.

Einstein was never the slightest bit surprised when his wild, untested theories wound up being proven mathematically. He was sure they would be. Just like Einstein, as designers we need to be shocked when we are wrong, instead of surprised when we are right. We must first believe that our designs are so great, so amazing that they will be viewed as more important and inspirational by history than the LC4 Chaise Lounge by Le Corbusier or the Apple Macintosh SE by frogdesign—just as Poe believed Eureka would become more important and revolutionary than the discovery of gravity.

To experience a practical example of the universe flowing through your designer-mind, try designing a sculpture that is free of client, project or brand criteria of any kind. What you will find is not an easier road, but a more challenging one. The decisions you make about form and composition will have to be based on whether or not the results read as “resolved.” Why does something inherently subjective need to be perceived as resolved? How can subjective abstraction seem resolved to large numbers of diverse people in exactly the same way? Your brain has stitched together compositions that harmonize with the way the universe and its real mathematically proven codes want us to experience things with unimpeded flow, just as perfect hexagons form on the surface of lake beds and on the inside of bees nests, just as art experts can outperform expensive equipment by using nothing more than a glance, and just as Einstein and Poe as well as all visually sensitive designers/artists are driven by unknown forces to imagine the unimaginable.

—Scott Henderson, IDSA, Principal, Scott Henderson Inc. scott@scotthendersoninc.com

This article was originally published in the fall 2019 edition of INNOVATION, the Quarterly Journal of the Industrial Designers Society of America