Around these parts, real geniuses of art get more airtime than scientists.
From Michelangelo to Shakespeare to Shaw and Cezanne and Hitchcock.
You learn more about people by studying history, biographies, philosophy, anthropology, and works of literature and drama and poetry than you will by studying brains and logic.
Why say this?
Because numbers consistently fail to account for the most interesting, important, and valuable parts of your life and mine.
Numbers are fine where numbers work.
They don’t work well at understanding people.
But there’s a downside to this way of thinking. Some hear “numbers aren’t everything” and leap-frog to the conclusion that “numbers don’t matter”.
Enter the “design bimbo”.
The design bimbo has no concern about facts, numbers, logical coherence, or form.
He or she — the design bimbo is not limited by gender — spews empty mush-head jargon at a breakneck pace. Disrupt, innovate, think outside the box, pivot, brainstorm, unpack that.
Thinking in pure numbers is a bad idea, indeed, but the opposite of one bad idea is often… another bad idea.
In between the extremes of the autistic engineer and the mush-head creative, there’s a third space.
That’s where genuine creative genius works.
There’s real structure, creating boundaries and limits.
The difference is that the form is in the many worlds of the artist — the worlds of painting, graphic design, writing novels, base-jumping, dark jazz music, and on and on.
There is no universal mathematical formula, no abstract rules, that explain genius and its work.
That doesn’t mean there are no rules at all.
The precision doesn’t come from numbers.
The artist gets precision and clarity from the context of creation.
Matt Perryman
https://matts.email