Earlier this week the San Francisco IxDa hosted a talk by Peter Stahl about The Rhythm of Interaction. As part of his presentation , Peter talked about Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s notion of Flow – “the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.”
Yesterday I came across a podcast I did a few years ago with the folks from Lunar where we talked about how speed, creativity and innovation intertwine in the design process and about getting results through design research. You can listen to the podcast at the bottom of the post; meanwhile I’ve pulled out a snippet where I describe entering a flow state when interviewing users.
And all the power of noticing and stepping back and slowing yourself down and just disengaging yourself from the need to be making things happen, is just sort of creating that space and t hat’s where insights happen. That’s where creativity can happen. And I’m sure you guys have seen that moment when you’re in the field, where you have all this responsibility to be managing a session and managing the other people in the session and making sure you stick to your time, and it’s a lot of, lot of work. Your brain is just firing on all its cylinders. And then sometimes for me there’s that moment where you kind of – it’s almost like a hyperspace moment where the starts start to just stretch out. Things just get really, really quiet in my head and suddenly, I’m just riding it. Things are sort of happening and I’m riding it, and that can be – it’s, I guess, a flow moment, right? Things can be really insightful at that moment. I don’t know that I’m bored, but if I had to contrast that to the stimulation of trying to run everything and run everybody, that seems to be a really kind of creative moment for me when that happens.
Listen to the podcast:
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Tags: flow, innovation, interviewing, lunar, podcast, speed
Great podcast and thoughts Steve – I think the role of ‘presence’ in ethno work is often much under addressed in design ethno / commercial ethno work especially. Why? Well. I guess the demands of deadlines and the need to produce ‘stuff’, ‘insights’ etc, and perhaps also the need to frame everything we do as some kind of method or technique so that our clients ‘buy it’ means crafting space for letting yourself be present during an interview or an observation session, to put aside self and self-concerns and just be with the people or events you are studying, gets harder and harder. And you are right it’s similar to the whole ‘culture of busy-ness’ thing – sadly infecting even our kids where unstructured play and the ‘being bored’ are increasingly rare. The irony is of course that many of the technologies and systems we so often are charged to contribute to are part of the problem. They eat time that otherwise could be spent just being present in the world. Though I’m not a Buddhist myself I had the great good fortune to live near a temple when I was a teenager and many of the things I saw, heard and experienced there taught me that the idea of ‘flow’ (which Buddhists have known about for centuries) and being present are hugely important to a balanced life. I recognised them and their value instantly when I got into fieldwork and always strive to be alert for them (hard as that often is, as you so rightly point out).
Comment by Cat Macaulay 08.22.11 @ 1:52 amCat – thanks for the Buddhist example. My girlfriend has been doing meditation lately (which closes with a lecture or presentation which seems to be a reflection around the challenges of meditation); I haven’t attended but love hearing from her what they discussed I find it super interesting; as you point out, the parallels are pretty definite!
Comment by Steve Portigal 08.22.11 @ 3:17 pmOh so much, every time I am in the field I remember how it felt being in meditation class, or even more strongly just being in the presence of people who are so fully present. regardless of the belief buy-in I really think it’s worth investigating. What’s also amazing is how closely linked Buddhist philosophy and many of the Western philosophical roots at the heart of a lot of anthro/ethno area methods and theory are (the Pragmatists in the US, Activity theorists in the USSR to cite just two examples were heavily influenced by the influx of Eastern thought systems to the West in the early 1900s)…
Comment by Cat Macaulay 08.26.11 @ 4:02 am