Website of Neil Goldberg
Social movement are inherently creative. We are in such a moment now and the streets of Oakland are an art gallery that has surfaced an energy that has been invisible to me until now. Its alive. It’s diverse. Its expressive of the moment and of the universal urgency for dignity and agency. It is beautiful.
“The Torah of Design – Living with Creative Intention” is an hour long workshop that is three things in one – design-thinking, Torah, and Mussar. I recorded this on May 29th 2020 at a Zoom event for Shavuot at Chochmat Halev, the Jewish community that I am part of in Berkeley, CA.
The following paragraph is the description I sent to participants:
“l present design-thinking method as a life-coaching framework (similar to many “design your life” books and courses available). Briefly we’ll discuss what the 4 big creation stories from the Torah teach us about creative agency and we’ll relate the “middot” (measures) of Mussar to the soul practices needed to be a designer of an intentional life. Through a demo I’ll (try) give an experiential understanding of the power of intentional creativity to living a life that brings you alive.”
Time didn’t allow me to get to the demo of the life-coaching part that I intended for the workshop.
You can view the presentation deck that I used by clicking below.
I have just begun my second semester teaching an Innovation by Design course in the College of Business at San Francisco State University. In it we practice the rudiments of design thinking to which I add an element of “design consciousness” that underpins “conscious design. Design consciousness is the beliefs and values that we bring to any purposeful creative effort. Our design consciousness has a defining impact on what we design, how we design it and what impacts our designs have, intended on otherwise. I am including it because we are rarely aware of many of the beliefs and values that underpin our design activities. This lecture introduces a framework for thinking about design consciousness and, at the end, I give the students an assignment to reflect on their own design consciousness.
(There is a break from 46:50 to 52:00 that you can skip)
On an October day in 2015, ecologist Meredith Root-Bernstein was watching a family of rare pigs at a Parisian zoo when something caught her eye. One of the Visayan warty pigs—a critically endangered species native to the Philippines—picked up a piece of bark in its mouth and started digging with it, pushing the soil around. “I said, Whoa, that’s pretty cool,” says Root-Bernstein, a visiting researcher at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris and a National Geographic Explorer. “When I looked up tool use in pigs, there was nothing.”
— Christine Dell’Amore, in National Geographic Oct 4, 2019
A number of species are known to be tool users, and some even are known to innovate new tool using behaviors from generation to generation. That is to say, they have a tool culture. But it has not been recognized to be true of pigs who are noted for their intelligence. I am delighted to discover another members of the small club of artifact using, making and designing species.
Design consciousness begins the moment when we (or any other species) begins to use artifacts that are dependent on behavioral rather than biological evolution. It is a long climb from simple tool use, such as that demonstrated by the pigs in this video, to the habitual and intentional design innovation of new tools that is the hallmark of being Human.
It lends further support to our awareness of this fact and the attempts that we are making now to figure out how to do it more systematically and at greater speed and scale. The ultimate shift in design consciousness is when we come around to recognizing design as an expression of the same adaptive instinct that compels a pig to pick up a piece of bark to dig their nests.
I find these signs of rising design concsiousness reassuring .
What the Labyrinth of Knossos Taught Me About What Is Needed to Design Well
My son grew up this year and went off to college to be trained as an architect. “How will he keep up with the math and the physics, the drafting and computer skills that is required?” is the concerned question I hear a lot. What could I say? My own 40 year journey as a designer has taught me that there is more to architecture than technical know-how, nuts and bolts, beams and columns on the one hand, or aesthetic taste on the other. But what, I asked myself, is his ability that has convinced me that he will succeed?
