By David Epstein (author of Range)
Introduction: Periodic table
- While most people think Dmitri Mendeleev came up with the periodic table in a dream, it was actually years of sustained intellectual labour. According to Michael Gordon, Mendeleev was trying different arrangements to come up with something that would work for the textbook that he owed his publisher. A good example of “never let the truth get in the way of a good story”. People buy what they want to believe in rather than the truth.
1. General Magic
- General Magic had too much creative freedom and too much money. (Bootstrapping Pebblely meant we didn’t have money to splash on marketing, which led me to try TikTok and drove much of the early traffic and customers.)
- Megan Smith: “Probably the most challenging part of the product was deciding what not to do. What to do, and what not to do.” (As I wrote in my Meimei essay about making software with AI)
- Leidy Klotz: humans reflexively add to solve problems even when subtracting is better. Lego experiment.
2. Pixar
- “Features that removed complexity were strongly preferred over features that added complexity (less is more),” Carnell and a colleague, Pat Hanrahan, wrote years later in an academic paper. (Good principle for product development, though hard in practice).
- "Think slow" when the project is small because iteration and learning are cheap. (I experimented with different ideas and made several big iterations with Fernsage before I had customers.)
- "the beautifully shaded penny": The director of The Incredibles wanted to get the fish in an aquarium in the background of a scene to flicker like flames, so the animators spent months on an inconsequential detail when the major characters still needed work.
- Tony Fadell: “If you don’t have constraints, then make up constraints!” He gave himself a Christmas deadline for the first iPod and shipped it that November. He created similar internal deadlines, called “heartbeats” for the iPhone. They were deadlines for finishing the entire projects but signals to pause, collect lessons, and regroup. For Nest, they made a prototype of the packaging long before there was a product.
3. Scientific research
- Brian Wansink: An influential nutrition researcher who published many famous studies. In a blog post, he accidentally revealed his poor research methods, specifically Hypothesizing After the Results are Known (HARKing) or p-hacking. Instead of proving or disproving his hypotheses, he sifted the data until he found positive associations, which could be false positives. 18 of his studies were retracted from scientific journals. (This is one reason I’m often skeptical of such human behavioral studies.)
- “In 2015, a project to re-create one hundred psychology studies from prominent journals found that fewer than half could be repeated with similar results.” (Again)
- Apple CEO John Sculley conducted a fake focus group to validate that CEOs like him wanted Newton, its handheld personal-assistant that didn't have a phone. It flopped.
- Galen, the second-century physician to Roman emperors: “All who drink of this remedy recover in a short time except those whom it does not help, who all die. Therefore, it is obvious that it fails only in incurable cases.”
- (Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” Cargo-Cult Science)
4. Music
- Inventor Simone Giertz: “It’s like if you can cook any meal, you’re probably going to cook something you already know, but if you can only cook with these three ingredients, you’re going to have to come up with something new.” (This is spot on for me.)
- Musician Peter Mendelsund: “If you lay enough rules on yourself, you’re going to find yourself in a territory you didn’t think you would end up in.”
- Catrina Tromp’s Green Eggs and Ham (after Dr Seuss’s Classic 1960 book) model of creativity: Limiting their options make people more creative
5. Writing
- Advertising industry: Give me the freedom of a tight brief
- Patricia Stokes: Paired constraints
- “Preclude” constraints to block previous solutions
- “Promote” constraints: a specific guideline and structured new method of doing something in place of the old
- Virginia Woolf
- Precluded traditional narration that fully knows its characters and the tendency to define people through their external details rather than inner experiences
- Promote portraying human thoughts without traditional structure
- Haruki Murakami wrote in his extremely limited English, instead of his native Japanese. "The language had to be simple, my ideas expressed in an easy-to-understand way, the descriptions stripped of all extraneous fat, the form made compact, everything arranged to fit a container of limited size."
- Stan Lee: DC Comics became its distributor and limited Atlas Comics to eight newsstand titles each month. Unable to use their high-volume strategy, Atlas reduced expenses and experimented with stories that might have more lasting appeal for readers: superheroes with real-life problems.
- Skeleton (winter sports): Athletes used to run with two hands gripping the sled until Pascal Richard and Paul Boehm invented the one-handed start. They were told by their coach to experiment and not do what they have always done.
- Basketball: When a star player is injured, the other players passed the ball around more, shot attempts become more evenly distributed, and their winning percentages upon the star's return improved to before the injury. (The "new" strategy went only partly back to normal when the star returned from injury.)
- London Underground: Because of a labor strike, commuters experimented with new routes and stuck with those routes, saving a collective 1500 hours of transit time each workday.
6. New yet familiar
- “Borrowing was so common that mid-twentieth-century preachers would occasionally pester one another to publish their sermons so that they would be riffed upon, like jazz sermons.” Often-repeated words provide something familiar for listeners amidst the new creative work.
- Martin Luther King Jr: He hitched his new message to pretested ideas with which he knew his listeners already agreed.
- A deductive sermon starts with an idea that the audience already considers positively irrefutable (e.g. some well-known Biblical lesson). The preacher then piles on anecdotes, analogies, literary quotations, scientific findings, statistics, news stories—anything that demonstrates, in the present day, the truth that listeners already embrace.
- Typology is a similar technique but for characters. E.g. Moses → Abraham Lincoln (freed slaves) → Gandhi (freed people from “the Egypt of colonialism”) → Supreme Court (ended legal school segregation) → You (who now have a chance to carry the torch of liberation)
- Before the Romantic period, prior works were viewed as an ideal platform for creativity and for connection with an audience not an impediment. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, was derived from the verse narrative The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke, which was an adaptation of a French prose story, which was in turn a version of an Italian tale.
- Robert McKee’s Archplot: A main protagonist struggles against some external force (through a sequence of clear cause-and-effect events) in order to achieve some desire en route to a conclusive ending.
- Thomas Edison: He initially limited bulbs to 13 watts so that they would produce light similar to familiar gas lamps. He retained lampshades even though they were no longer needed to protect gas flames from a draft. He used meters based on the familiar devices used by gas companies to charge customers (even though he hadn't yet figured out a way for meters to measure usage until six months later).
- The ideal creative team is also a mix of people who have collaborated before and some with no common background experience.
- Skeuomorphism: New stuff retaining facets of old stuff in order to communicate to users what the new stuff can do.
- UPS's ORION: Even though the algorithm was helping to save miles of driving, drivers were resistant to it because the suggested route differed from their familiar route and there were oddities like cul-de-sac zigzag. Instead of forcing drivers to bend to the algorithm, the algorithm was bent to meet them partway by considering their wisdom, such as avoiding a certain street around day-care drop-off.
- Star Wars: Lucas initially intended to remake Flash Gordon, the space adventure he’d adored as a child, but he was unable to get licensing rights. Instead, he adapted visual and thematic elements, and built something fresh. Lucas carried the influence of Flash Gordon, but his inability to secure the rights flung him from the obvious path.
- Jorge Luis Borges: “They are the irresponsible sport of a shy sort of man who could not bring himself to write short stories, and so amused himself by changing and distorting (sometimes without aesthetic justification) the stories of other men.”
7. Armor
- Military vests: Over the years, to protect soldiers, the vests grew from about nine pounds to over three pounds. A redesign attempt to improve mobility could only save one pound and added a quick release tab (for emergency, not mobility) instead. Eventually, the Army introduced Modular Scalable Vests, designed for women but turned out to be better for many men, too. A notch behind the neck for women’s hair buns made it easier for everyone to look up with prone.
- Jet cockpits: A enormous number of training accidents prompted the Air Force to look into the cockpit design. They had been designed based on the average measurements of hundreds of pilots but no individual was near the average on all of the body measurements. A cockpit designed to fit the average pilot fit no one. The solution was adjustable cockpit.
- Universal design: Designing with a focus on the most constrained users will often produce an outcome that is better for most people. The challenges of the “extreme users” are frequently extreme versions of challenges many other people faced.
- OXO: Thick contoured rubber handle for his arthritic wife → Ergonomic utensils
- Aeron: Plastic webbing, instead of cushion, to support older adults with weakened muscle
- Frederick Winslow Taylor: “In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.” Users should fit the system. If they didn’t fit, the problem is with them, not the system. (That’s the issue with systems designed for the average, like Singapore’s public pool.)
- Henry Dreyfuss: “fitting the machine to the man rather than the man to the machine”
- Cuisinart: Marc Harrison, when redesigning the food processor, incorporated a large cylindrical handle that was easy to grip, chunky paddle-like buttons, and high-contrast lettering oriented to the user’s viewpoint.
- Guggenheim Museum: Frank Lloyd Wright disliked the barriers to movement and decided to create a building that was one giant accessible ramp.