Frank Gehry on Design Thinking
This post is based on an account by Richard J Boland and Fred Collopy on working with Frank Gehry on the Peter B. Lewis building (at the Weatherhead School of Management) and a speech by Frank Gehry on the opening of the building in 2003. These are both detailed in the book Managing As Designing
Frank Gehry is universally recognised as one of the greatest architects in the modern era. This article isn’t about ‘design thinking’ i.e the process made popular by IDEO and Stanford d.school but rather the thinking processes that guide a world-class designer. It’s about the mindset that Frank Gehry employs when trying to solve problems. The authors refer to this as having a design attitude
A Design Attitude
“He approaches each new project with a desire to do something different than he has done before and to experiment with materials, technologies and methods in his quest”
While working with Gehry the authors identify a real difference between the way Gehry sought to solve problems and how traditional managers reliant on default solutions approach problem-solving.
A design attitude entails problem-solving while absorbing a broad range of alternatives, a lot of the times well outside the field or industry. For example, to get the curves right for the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Gehry employed aerospace engineers and used software developed for the aerospace industry to get it just right. Steve Jobs another infamous design thinker didnt look to the retail industry when it came to designing the Apple stores, instead, he asked himself where do people like hanging out. And the answer was the lobby of 5-star hotels. So he put his staff through the Four Seasons training program to find out why. One of the answers was the hotel concierge, someone who was friendly to talk to and who could answer your questions. Hence the Genius Bar at Apple stores.
When it comes to picking between alternatives, a design attitude is cognizant of the cost of not conceiving of a better alternative than those already considered, is often much higher than making the wrong choice among visible alternatives. A design attitude views each project as an opportunity for invention. What is relished is the lack of predetermined outcomes. As Gehry has said, “if I know how a project was going to turn out, I wouldn’t do it”. Each project is an opportunity to inquire as to what is the real problem being faced and what is the best solution?
On First Principles
At the start of every design project, Gehry starts with some disarmingly simple questions. For example with the Peter B. Lewis building (at the Weatherhead School of Management) he would start with: “What is teaching?” “What is learning?” ‘What is an office?” “What is a faculty?” The reason being he saw design as going back to those assumptions that have become invisible or unnoticed but are the primary reasons for working on a project. A quest to find the real thing that needs to be accomplished untethered from the residue of years of organizational habit. Each project is seen as an opportunity for betterment over existing products, services, or processes.
Elon Musk goes by what he calls first principle reasoning i.e boiling things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there as opposed to reasoning by analogy. An example Musk gives in this interview is that battery packs he developed for Tesla were thought of as being too expensive — and in a similar process to Gehry he asked himself what are the material constituents of a battery? What is the market value of the material constituents? And if those individual material constituents were bought at a metal exchange and reassembled could the price come down? Elon calls it a physics way of thinking but the similarities to Gehry’s approach are evident
The Starchitect or when to compromise
Frank Gehry is a celebrity, he even guest starred in The Simpsons. When we look at buildings such as the Guggenheim or the Disney Concert hall it is tempting to group him with other visionaries and fall for the lone creator myth. He is labelled a ‘starchitect’ — a moniker he deplores. The fact is that Gehry has an expert team around him and he won’t design a building that will not function.
When he designs a building Gehry tell his clients that they will be in a liquid state for most of the process. In the liquid state, there is information gathering, consultations and experiments with methods, materials and design ideas. He takes pains not to finalise an idea too soon. During that liquid period, he builds models, his initial models he calls ‘schreck’ models. It is a Yiddish expression for making people nervous. He shows them to clients and they get nervous. But he does that so they can follow along with the trajectory of his thinking. This is also where he listens to the client and other stakeholders address their needs and make compromises where needed. The end result is a meeting point between function and vision.
However, he tells a story of how he was commissioned to build a mental health facility, he sat in on some of the group therapy sessions. After one session he spoke to a young woman and asked her what her ideal room would look like. She responded with fantastic detail right down to mouldings. He looked around and realised that she was describing the room that they were in. When clients tell him what they wanted they would do the same thing. They describe the known known. The job of a creator (or a design thinker) is to set visions that inspire others to strive beyond what is known in creating a future they can be proud to live in. He would compromise on function, not on vision.
The Map is not the Territory
The antithesis of a design attitude is a decision attitude. A decision attitude carries with it a default representation of the problem being faced. It solves problems by making rational choices among predetermined alternatives. Solutions tend to fit neat frameworks or modes of thinking. As Nassim Taleb mentions in his book The Bed of Procrustes, “ we humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives, which, on the occasion, has explosive consequences”
A decision attitude starts with the assumption that alternative courses of action are already at hand, that the good design work has already taken place. A problem solver then becomes passive, settling for what is already on the table and going with whatever first comes to mind.
As an example consider the (rather boring) problem of inventory control. Traditionally the thinking to tackle this concerned the timing, quantity and location of inventory and how this affected various sections of production. This led to elegant techniques for calculating reorder points, smaller lot sizes and minimising costs. All within the boundaries of timing, quantity and location of inventory acquisitions.
Then the Japanese come along with lean manufacturing and rather than manage inventory they eliminated it.
In a clearly defined, stable situation when the likely outcomes are well known a decision attitude may be the most efficient way to approach a problem — like in a classroom.. or a fantasy. But when those conditions don’t hold like in the real world, a design attitude is required. The only creation of value is the birthing of products and services that serve human needs
Functional in a broad Sense
In conclusion, functional or functionality in a building goes beyond whether a building simply works. Being functional also entails bringing emotionality to the table. Is it humanistic? Functional means achieving a building that does all the things we want as humans from our buildings. More than that it is how the building is perceived by the broader community. Gehry was raised by a Jewish family where he was taught the psalmbook by his grandfather. What stayed with him is the lesson from Rabbi Hillel, when challenged by a skeptic to explain the Jewish religion while standing on one foot ‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you’. It is this Golden Rule that he thinks about when designing a building. Am I being a good neighbour?
As he says “When I make a building, I want it to feel easy on the hand for people. This means we give a lot of attention to all the little details of how the building will feel to them, from door handles to passageways. I think about how to give people a kind of handrail, so that the unfamiliar can become familiar to them. You give them back what they expect or what they deserve in your best work, but within the context of the Golden Rule, and it always has to be responding to the question “Why?” ”
Frank Gehry on Design Thinking
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