STATE OF FLOW: WHAT I WISH DESIGN SCHOOLS WOULD TEACH

"Ideas are not very useful when making art"- Tony Cragg

What if I were to tell you that there is a way to increase your creativity, productivity, and ability to deliver inspiring, life-changing design breakthroughs by a thousand times—the news of your achievement traveling the world in seconds as it is devoured by a population hungry for tangible leaps. What if I were to also tell you that much of the way design is taught and practiced is in direct conflict with this incredible and very real superpower—that the group brainstorming sessions, project management and business communication apps, social medial, Zoom meetings, and, of course, the Post-it note wall decoration parties are actually hampering and even outright preventing these eureka moments we so fervently crave. Sounds nuts? Consider this.

Let’s peel open the design history book for a second. The Bauhaus School, founded 101 years ago this past April 1, continues to shape the curriculums in our most prominent and prestigious design schools—most of them first immersing their new recruits into the Bauhausinan construct known as Foundation Year. Harkening back to a more innocent time, there I was, a young would-be design student barely able to do my own laundry, wash a dish, or fry an egg, carrying my massively oversized portfolio case with its T-Square protruding from the unzipped corner of its wafer-thin Seussian proportions, scurrying in a disheveled frenzy of sweat to my freshman Foundation classes that would become the bonding agent for all learning yet to come. I didn’t know it then, but these required classes were the same ones that a young Marcel Breuer, Annie Albers, and Herbert Bayer all took and probably arrived late to as well, similarly untucked and uncoiffed to the dismay of their professors which included László Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. 

Water Gropius, the Bauhaus school’s founder, laid out some profound principals in his 1919 Bauhaus Manifesto, the second of which goes like this: “There is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman. The artist is [just] an exalted craftsman. In rare moments of inspiration, transcending the consciousness of his will, the grace of heaven may cause his work to blossom into art.”

Transcending the consciousness of his will! How awesome is that? If the design schools of today want to underscore only one thing from the Bauhaus, it is this golden nugget I wish they would embrace. What this excerpt suggests is that if you free yourself from the chains of your own limited conscious mind and our many self-inflicted distractions, your thinking will calm down just long enough to absorb external forces of influence, and soon enough, your designs will radiate like bottled lightning. Transcending the consciousness of our will suggests that what we are able to laboriously contrive as the craftspeople of design is vastly inferior to what might unconsciously flow through us as the artists of it.

Be the Flow

It was the summer of 1969—the summer of love. If you think things are f**ked now, consider that in 1969 the war in Vietnam was raging out of control and we were losing. Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, was convicted of felony tax fraud while in office and had to be replaced by a new vice president, Gerald Ford, who later became full-on president when his boss broke into a hotel to steal information from the Democratic National Committee. Things were so off the rails that when a music festival was planned on a small farm in upstate New York, nobody could have predicted the massive highway-choking turnout of free-loving youth who desperately needed escape from the bloody shark frenzy of deceit and depravation at the top of the chain. So suffocated was the infrastructure of this tiny Catskill hamlet where Max Yasgur’s dairy farm was pulverized into a muddy, slippery cataclysm, the headlining acts scheduled to perform couldn’t get there on time—blocked by snarled highways of baking rubber and steel. All except for Richie Havens, a relatively unknown folk singer from New York City’s West Village who, along with his three-piece band, just happened to be there early. 

Not scheduled until well after five of the biggest names in the music business had blasted out the smash hits of the day—bands like Iron Butterfly, Santana, and The Grateful Dead—Havens went on first, at the bemoaning of the show’s producers, to fill the uncomfortably vacant stage and to quell the impatient human-ocean of fans that swelled before it, playing everything in his entire repertoire and still searching for more while the missing performers were endlessly mired in the quicksand of impassible country roads. What do you do in a situation like this? How do you handle such insurmountable pressure on the creative mind? Apparently, you invent a song on the fly. Richie Haven’s “Freedom,” his final goosebump-inducing cry that became the anthem of the Woodstock Music Festival and one of the most memorable songs of the entire 1960s, was spontaneously adlibbed from the thin summer air. “Freedom” was so off-the-cuff that Havens had to watch film footage of his performance later so he could duplicate it. This song was not laboriously contrived from the conscious mind, but instead was the result of being in a state of flow—from transcending the consciousness of his will, just as Gropius would have wanted. 

According to Steven Kotler, a speaker, flow junkie, and author of over 70 publications, including The Rise of Superman, “Flow follows focus.” He says, “When captured only one or perhaps even two days a week, being in a state of flow can increase productivity and the value of our output by a thousand times.” Kotler also describes how the flow state releases all five of the brain’s pleasure enzymes at once—norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin, anandamide, and endorphins—making it one of the most highly additive states of consciousness. This would explain why artists and writers chase expression often with little hope of monetary payback. They are literally addicted to the feeling they get when they can pull information out of their minds that they had no idea was in there.

Kotler also explains that if you happen to work for a company where it’s mandatory that emails be returned in an hour or messages be returned in 15 minutes or your presence at meetings is required three or four times a day, that’s a disaster that will destroy high performance. To reach the realm of flow, you need uninterrupted brain-calming focus!

Design is well aligned to the game of chess in that to do it right you have to be thinking at least five moves ahead, balancing a tall stack of greasy, unstable ideas before losing them to the rolling breeze. The creation of a strong, resonating three-dimensional form often has as much to do with math as it does the ability to traverse dimensions—seeing the front, side, and top simultaneously in the fleeting yet crystalline movies of your mind while you ride the wave of flow before it plunges you into the cold, sharp coral below, these brief glimpses lost in the foaming surf, repatriated to the ocean of breakthroughs that always seem to be just out of your reach. This elusive side of design is too slippery to be captured on a three-by-three Post-it note.

Adrian Bejan, a mechanical engineering professor at Duke University, the winner of the prestigious Benjamin Franklin Medal for his pioneering contributions in thermodynamics and the father of what is known as constructal law, thinks that all living things try to maximize flow, an essential ingredient to life as well as to how we think. While designing a cooling system for laptop computers, he realized through continuous refinements of its design that the cooling structure started to look like a tree. The more treelike the heat sink looked, the better it worked. The fact that tree branches, the structure of your lungs, a bolt of lightning, and the cracks in a lake bed all look and behave similarly have nothing to do with coincidence. Bejan notes that everything flows, from the fluids inside our bodies to the electricity that feeds our homes, as do artistic movements and breakthroughs in design, and when these systems are blocked, they die. According to Bejan, to get to a heightened state of creative flow, “you must free yourself as much as you can. The freer you are, the more dynamic you'll be. Freedom is good for design,” as our friend Richie Havens would agree.

Ideas Are Like Water

Did you know that no new water is being created or destroyed on Earth and that the water molecules we drink, bathe with, and swim in today have been around for at least the past few hundred million years—probably passing through dinosaurs as pee on their way to our mocha latté? Creativity is the same. According to Arthur Koesler in his 1964 book The Act of Creation, “Creativity is a blending of elements drawn from two previously unrelated ideas—combining them into a new meaning by using comparison, abstraction, categorization, analogies and metaphors.” We create fresh combinations of existing elements, their origins layered in enough abstraction that they read as new. Knowing that seems to make things slightly easier, right?

Koesler also says that “creative breakthroughs occur after a period of intense conscious effort directed at the problem [otherwise known as the painful and frustrating part of the creative journey] and these same breakthroughs get suppressed by the anxieties and distractions of our daily routines.” We know the information is in our heads, but we just can’t summon it no matter how hard we try other than to say, “It’s right on the tip of my tongue!” However, you’ve unleashed your subconscious mind toward the task, and although you don’t realize it, it has bolted dutifully from the starting gate and is racing its way toward the backstretch. It just takes a while to return because the information you requested is buried under the dusty cardboard boxes of grandma’s heavy bone china in the cobwebs of your cold, darkened attic. However, you go to sleep for eight hours and when you wake up discover that—voilà!—the information has been magically deposited into your conscious mind as fresh and potent as the morning coffee, your brain having received a software update while you slept. You stitch these experiences, analogies, symbols, and metaphors into a new solution like an excited, giddy child, eyes welled up and heart pounding, because you know you’ve nailed it—and your brain floods with the pleasure drug milkshake that will bring you back for more. 

I would love for the design student of today to understand that it is OK to seek out solitude in order to calm you mind, think in peace, and find your vision. That the gut-wrenching pain and anxiety you feel will give way to brilliance in due time, and that the real excitement of design occurs when we transcend the consciousness of our will and harness the power of flow.

Scott Henderson, IDSA. scott@scotthendersoninc.com

This article was originally published in the winter, 2020 edition of INNOVATION, the Quarterly Journal of the Industrial Designers Society of America.