Today, as a more experienced builder, I find many of those examples to be less helpful, not because the possibilities they present or their execution are any less imaginative, skillfully rendered, or thoughtful. I’m simply aware of the fact that very little of what I encountered on these sites back then actually saw the real light of day. Why does that matter? What is so important about ideas that go beyond the imagined visual or portfolio piece and into the real world? When thinking about this stage of creativity there’s a phenomenon I would best describe as ‘inversion’, which, from my perspective, completely changes the way you think about building a product.
In 2013, I went to a talk at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) featuring Walid Raad and Theaster Gates with the former speaking first, then the latter, then the two together in conversation. It was probably one of the most interesting and engaging artist talks I’ve ever been fortunate enough to attend. Both artists’ practices revolve around questions of space, public narrative amidst conflict, transformation, violence, rebirth, conscientious subversion, and memory. In this particular talk, they both reflected on the positionality of their art in relation to cities and space in transition.
One of the stranger things about this talk is that the GSD has, to this day, never posted Walid’s portion of the talk on YouTube despite it being, from what I remember, an incredible rumination on the surreal experience of reconciling the tension between understanding his art-making process and the manipulation of space while staging that art. He expanded that questioning to the increasingly influential role the Middle East has taken in the art world through a hybrid model of patronage-consumption (using examples such as the Louvre Abu Dhabi), that uses physicality and (re)development to reframe globe-spanning relationships to art and culture. These actions shift our understanding of the inherent histories of place and seek to replace our memories while obscuring the multiplicity of movements reshaping the global cultural and political economy. In one particularly mind-bending section of the talk, Raad described the surreal experience of looking at a model for a solo exhibition he was preparing in Germany. He described the uncanny sense of reconciling the manipulation of the model which, while still a small-scale representation of the show itself, is the ultimate act of shifting space and experience ahead of time, anticipating the audience’s sense of engagement, which perhaps ends up being even more impactful in terms of how the work is perceived and remembered than the work itself.
I’ve been reflecting on this idea, specifically as I bring the second step of my creative process back into focus. Raad’s framing of the surreal experience of seeing the prototype of the final thing is profound. To get to this stage, you need an initial thesis on what the contours of the design (or product or exhibition) are going to be. Seeing the early form of that design come together, even if it is a much reduced version, surfaces things about your creation you didn’t think of before. There are factors that were previously imperceptible therefore unrecognizable as parameters of intervention or even factors to question. This thinking becomes a sort of ‘inversion' because you start to see what you’re creating not just from the inside as a ‘pure’ concept emerging from the mind of a builder but from the outside as a consumer. Suddenly, it’s easy to start picking apart different aspects, noticing areas where your thesis or vision was particularly prescient but also where it might have fallen short. New questions and ideas start to emerge, blending with and interrogating the previous ones. Inversion can essentially be the ability to judge and discern from a new perspective, one that is more deeply informed, likely more aligned with the desired audience, and ultimately, a path for uncovering greater creative possibilities.
What does inversion do for me? It’s about experiencing something for real. I’d argue it provides a stronger capacity to deliver a better outcome in the creative process. It increases the amount of empathy you make yourself available to as a means of expanding your creative capacity. It requires a more genuine engagement with reality. Reflecting back on that first experience building Ceylon’s products and thinking about what inversion might have meant in that context revealed that I should have done more prototyping, making samples, mock-ups, and one-offs. It would have been helpful and certainly more empowering long-term to see my early limitations, blind spots, and dogmas that led to the product falling short of my expectations in the very beginning.
-PB