We took a step off the gas pedal this week. It was Reading Week And although I found myself in our project room a few days this week and in constant contact with my colleagues and clients I was still able to create a little distance from the project. Which is a good thing. Distance provides perspective and perspective fosters new ideas and the refinement of existing ideas.

 In the spirit of Reading Week I wanted to share two passages on creativity and technology and art. Surprisingly, both are about 30 years old but have maintained their truth and insight.

That’s all the Motorcycle is, a system of concepts, worked out in steel. There’s no part in it, no shape in it, that is not out of someone’s mind…I’ve noticed that people who have never worked with steel have trouble seeing this – that the motorcycle is a primarily a mental phenomenon.

Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

The technical computer specialists, on the other hand, have to become aware of the potential contribution of the artists, develop a respect for their pattern perceiving and pattern generating abilities, for their trained sensitivity to the exploration of novelty, their ability to select what is most significant; indeed—at their best—to make concrete the future before it happens, before we can define it, formalize it and verbalize it. We may well end up in the next few years with a few individuals who have mastered both sides reasonably well. Programmer-artists and artist-programmers. Collaboration and multimedia are not impossible, only extremely hard and rarely successful. But then, so is most activity of a high ambition, high risk, innovative nature.

Leslie Mezei, Artist and Computer (1975)     

These ideas aptly capture the essence of our work at MDM; it’s the spirit of collaboration. Whether you are a programmer working with a designer or an artist with a programmer the realization that we are simply dealing with human concepts opens up the door to true collaboration where barriers dissolve and innovation emerges.