I’ve heard time and time again that design is by an large a skill that can be learned, cre­ativ­ity can be unlocked and good design is dri­ven by research and data. This may be true for those of us who have the nec­es­sary poten­tial to be cre­ative thinkers, in forms of genet­i­cally inher­ited traits which give rise to the nat­ural ten­dency to think dif­fer­ently and in ways that pro­mote cre­ative insights. But hon­estly, most human beings don’t have that kind of poten­tial. Sir Ken Robin­son says every per­son is born cre­ative but loses it in adult­hood. While it’s com­fort­ing to those who have lost their right hemi­spheres along the way to adult­hood that there is a lost-and-found, it’s an overly-optimistic view­point which I dis­agree. Go to a nurs­ery and one can observe kids that clearly demon­strate a lack of cre­ativ­ity, espe­cially in com­par­i­son to one that does. We are not all born cre­ative, period.

What sep­a­rates the cre­ative thinkers from wannabes is the same for peo­ple with a per­fect pitch – the abil­ity of a per­son to iden­tify or re-create a given musi­cal note with­out the ben­e­fit of an exter­nal ref­er­ence, and those who acquires rel­a­tive pitch with train­ing. I am not say­ing that hav­ing the poten­tial of a true cre­ative thinker auto­mat­i­cally sets you up to become one, just as being able to iden­tify musi­cal notes does not guar­an­tee musician-hood. Albert Ein­stein, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Thomas Edi­son, Mahatma Gandhi, Martha Gra­ham Pablo Picasso and the oth­ers who appear in Apple’s Think Dif­fer­ent ad are the embod­i­ment of the qual­i­ties of the true cre­ative thinker. These peo­ple have good taste and like per­fect pitch good taste can­not be acquired. And no, using Macs, iPhones and iPads, putting Andy Warhol posters on your wall, dri­ving BMWs or lis­ten­ing to Bach is not going to give you good taste.

Any­one who has worked in a cre­ative field—or has reflected on his or her own creativity—recognizes that being cre­ative is nec­es­sar­ily chaotic, some­times arbi­trary, and often unpre­dictable. Why do ideas come eas­ily one day and not the next? Where does inspi­ra­tion come from? These are mys­te­ri­ous ques­tions. – Ben McAllister

Ben McAl­lis­ter of Frog Design talks about sci­en­tism, and how it offers the busi­ness world place­bos of well-intentioned but false promises of “research”. Although sci­en­tific research pro­vides us with cer­tain­ties about our phys­i­cal world, it does not mea­sure up in the busi­ness world that tries to work around a com­plex sys­tem inhab­ited by autonomous and sub­jec­tive indi­vid­u­als. It isn’t so sim­ple or know­able. The cus­tomer wants pre­dictabil­ity and reli­a­bil­ity and thus believe at his own peril that design research offers a pre­dictable method­ol­ogy. It is as if any­one could fol­low the same steps and end up with a great design on the other end.

Some of us are cre­ative thinkers, most of us aren’t. Design­ers, while sci­en­tism can help you gain accep­tance in the short term and make you look good in front of fools, it ulti­mately cheap­ens the most impor­tant dimen­sion of their work: the human dimen­sion, includ­ing things like judg­ment, taste, and cre­ativ­ity. Remem­ber, as Paula Scher writes in Make it Big­ger, “It is the rare com­bi­na­tion of the designer’s intel­li­gence, intu­ition, inspi­ra­tion, and aes­thetic sense—dare I say talent?—that makes for suc­cess­ful design.”