The thing about belonging to society and learning languages is that we try and find meaning. We look at an abstract painting and we almost cant appreciate it unless we see some meaning in it, a familiar figure, a story, an emotion. If we dont find the meaning of the painting, we want to ask someone what it means. Its hard to resist the thought that perhaps you could just leave the painting on the wall and appreciate it. Ever since we are taught we learn that everything has a purpose, just like how every cell in our bodies have a certain function to perform even if it is to die (like a nail).

And this is why we spend a whole lotta time trying to find a larger meaning to life. I have met people who are so restless about finding meaning. Meeting god, making others happy, changing the world or simply as the monologue from Trainspotting commands: ‘The job the family, the big television, the washing machine, the car, the compact disk and electrical tin opener, good health, low cholestrol, dental insurance, mortgage, start a home, leisure wear, luggage, three piece suit, DIY, game shows, junk food, children, walks in the park, 9-5, washing the car, choicest sweaters, family christmas, index pension, tax exemption, clearing gutters, getting by looking ahead the day you die’

A year ago, I received a lovely answer from a friend: ‘There is no point in anything, agreed, but that’s also the beauty of life isn’t it ? You can turn life into whatever is “pointy” for you.’ And the answer was followed by this:

This year, I got asked the same question from a friend and I replied: ‘Why should there be a point all the time? Sometimes you can just be.’

Now you may think that I am confused. First I sound impressed with the idea about turning life into any point you like, and then I also talk about just being. The thing is I dont have ‘a’ point, but many points, like a horizon. Its ambitious but I am the kind of person who wants to do many different things. It may not even work for we do have a short life filled with unexpected events.  Life is a full glass of 16 million colors. Its important to just be sometimes and let yourself flow, just as much as it is important you climb to the point of your life. You can shrug me off saying that life’s a line or a to-do list, but when you close your eyes for a moment pretending that time has stopped, you can see a sky glistening in pastels.

While the world awaits something new to play with, I am still going to DT to grab a pint as regularly as I can. I dont have time to find out what process is in vogue and what jargons help people listen to you. I have been lucky to meet a few design thinkers, who have helped me think better. And well I just drew the path from there.

My tip: Get a feel for the subject, dont treat is as thinking outside a box. I think thats why people get frustrated with the endeavor. They live in a box and try to get out of it. Wake up you! You built the walls of the box!

To me design thinking starts with being a polymath. Every design thinker I respect has been a polymath. A polymath is someone who sees patterns instead of compartments, rather like connecting boxes together and giving them porous walls. Technically a polymath is supposed to be a genius with a high IQ, who has a vast breadth of many subjects in commendable depth. These people use their knowledge of many subjects to join the dots and converge at interesting patterns, turning them into novel ideas. A polymath requires strong imagination to make connections between vastly different ideas.

Design Thinking

Think about these people and tell me you see what I see: (I am picking familiar, dead people from Wikipedia for these bullets):

• Charles and Ray Eames

• Pythagoras

• Hypatia

• Buckminster Fuller

• Isaac Newton

• Galileo Galilei

• Charles Sanders Peirce

• Leonardo Da Vinci

Specializing in one field is alot like riding a horse with reins. You look ahead. We need to look to the right, left, above, below and some even look behind. I’m always fascinated by chameleons, they must have the capability to produce such original ideas! I wouldnt vouch for an entire world of generalists and polymaths as well. Specializing in a field builds a niche market which is quite good for anybody’s wallet. Popular design groups in fact apply this approach by employing specialists in different fields and teaming them together. Thus the design thinker is in fact a team of thinkers rather than one studious individual.

In summary, design thinking lies somewhere between recognizing patterns, systems design and vivid imagination. There is no magic wand. You cant roll or sit in a boardroom to achieve it.  Its not about being left or right brained, or ticking a checklist of processes or reading a best-selling book. Instead you think about it so much in your head that you elevate your mind to a state of flow. You wake up thinking about it, you talk about it to the stranger seated beside you on the bus, to your boss, to your daughter who’s four and to the grimy dishes your washing. And most of all it is not about spending time trying and planning to design think when you can spend time thinking and trying out samples of ideas.

One of those things that make you smile.

When I started off as a conceptualizer, quite a few people told me that I need to spend less time on common problems as sometimes hundreds or perhaps even thousands of people have already worked on it. Why do you want to re-invent the wheel? I was often asked.

It made sense on some level, because I was young and raw and what I needed to do was to first and foremost create things. I spent too much time on just thinking about problems at different levels.

But somehow, I still secretly liked to think of problems that everyone claims to have solved.

You see, maybe there is something better than the wheel. Maglevs for instance.

You cant limit human imagination. Trying to re-invent is an interesting mental exercise. First in trying to break your mental modals of what your familiar with and second in having the courage that you can crack a problem that thousands of people will quite likely resist because they may not be willing to break their mental modals. Its like a battle against all odds.

And like Spivak says, perhaps it is a worthy problem to plod with after all.

The way I see things, the whole deal is that increasing computing power reduces the need for human beings to work. Therefore we need to reduce the working population appropriately.

If you traced humans over the years you can actually see a cycle transferring us from collectivists to  individualists to collectivists. The individualist period is usually a plateau forming a nice  for the new wave of collectivism. as we become individualist we reach a certain plateau as a human race and rethink what our sense of belonging is and begin another journey that symbolizes the public sentiment. We started off as nomads (individualists) settled into tribes (collectivists)…..countries (individualist to a certain extent because we connected to geography rather than society)…with the internet (initially individualist, later on collectivist with all the social networking).

As a human there is an inherent need for ‘belonging’ whether in one’s own fantasies or in grime reality. I feel our idea of a family is currently changing. Divorces, gay marriages, multiple-parents, spinsterdom, nuclearization…..

People seem to find more solace in connecting with people of similar interests or music or issues rather than blood allegiance. Thousands of years ago, our loyalties were to a tribe, hundreds of years ago to our families, and now perhaps to others of similar minds. We’ve already started cloud computing and soon we’ll look into a cloud for more than servers. With sites and services that allow you to rent friends, who needs to have a real family?

You see I never studied philosophy as a regular program but for some reason this field of study was my conciliation whenever I didnt know what to do and whom to ask. The abstractions and ideas of things that are and arent can seem to tell you whether or not to buy that lipstick when your at a store.

So when a Boy called philosophy as ‘gas, concocted by noble academicians’ I found myself dumbstruck for a reasonable retort. You see there is some truth in that most philosophers walked around taking about abstractions and most often didnt do very much in real life other than talk about their ideas to a large audience. The people who changed the world were really others who may have interpreted some philosophical ideas.

Recently when a Dear one gifted a copy of Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy, I realized that I had found an answer. When you look for answers you find that answers come to you. I havent read the book entirely. But the prologue has already begun sizzling my neurons.

Yes perhaps philosophy comes across as a grandiloquent field. Often the language is so tedious that I must resort to graphic versions of the philosopher’s works to actually grab the essence. Also much more time has to be spent trying to understand the world they lived in and how they came about to a certain idea.

But let me get to the point. The thing is philosophy is not very different from imagination as Durant suggests. Its a manner in which one imagines what the world could be like if not an ideal one. It is this imagination that a philosopher plans to dictate. Before dictating the ideas, the philosopher rationalizes the flying dragons and silvered unicorns. You see if the stuff didnt bother to appear scientific then it would be hard to advise world changers on the matter. By providing the idea in abstract form, the world changers can tune it to their own mode of action.

So I do find myself less troubled to think of philosophers as imaginators who question identity, society and religion when they close their eyes and dream. And thats why they dont walk around the world too much. You have to open your eyes for that. And when you do, its much harder to think of utopia.

Calling Boy right now…

When I was growing up I shunned Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys and most other adolescent books. The protagonists knew french, ski-diving, could repair a car, had fancy gadgets and always were best friends with an expert in some facet of technology. Arrghh! I tried to search for a hero who didnt come form outer space, or who had a luxurious inheritance. I moved quickly to more complex stories, Grisham, Steele, Chrichton, Maclean and still found myself in a world where action, adventure and thrilling stories happened only to the initiated ones.

I had issues with mythological gods as well because they always seem unerring. And even if they would commit some promiscuity, one could quickly find literary texts supporting their actions, attempting to deify the erroneous even more. At an age when  ‘Who is your role model’ received a sure shot answer from my friends, I stumbled.  Why should we have a role model? Why is any protagonist so great that one needs to model oneself after them? Im not a skeptic. I do appreciate each person for their characteristics. But it is the eccentricities and flaws that paint a person in richer hues. So it wasnt very long before I entered the seemingly boring world of non-fiction, profanely terming and entire world of fiction writing as a simple ‘page-popper’.

Smugly sitting on an intellectual bench with a hardbound philosophy book, I notice now that our heroes are changing. It really is the influence of the internet. Becoming a hero is as merely as laborious as uploading a video on youtube or writing a blog.  Your classroom project could feature you in a movie, turn you into a millionaire and pop your photo on teenage tshirts. The omnipresent, omniscient protagonist is leaving our pages. And we are going to see more of this. Kickass, Zuckerberg, Jobs, Swan, Salander and many more are walking down the aisle with a new generation of writers. The new protagonists create rave waves of reviews, fan following and less cereal boxes and stuffed toys. Its the pages when they fail and reciprocate their angst and their obsession that imprint in our minds when the book has long turned to its back.

Hello friends of Frodo! There is alot of room on my shelf for you.

Weeeehaaaaawwwwwwwwwww