Design inspiration can come from so many different sources that aren't even related to design or lighting. You never know when you are going to see or learn something that could be the inspiration for your next project. One of my favorite examples of this is from the story that Steve Jobs, cofounder of Apple Computers, gave during his commencement speech to Stanford University in 2005:
"I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closes I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life.....
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girls. So my parents who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" The said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sing the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decision I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5 cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get on good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.
Reed College at the time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the camps every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had ever a hop of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we where designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.....Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something-your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."
What I have personally taken away from this story is that it is ok to pursue hobbies that do not directly relate to your career. You never know when ideas from these other areas of study will serve as inspiration for your next project. I have often contemplated taking a few hours out of every work week to "be creative" and do something that wasn't work. This could include walking around the city and looking at art pieces, photographing architecture or landscape, sketching items of interest, etc. This may not be such a bad idea?
I am also reading the book The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman for one of MBA classes and Freidman brings up an interesting point that relates to this topic. He argues that a balanced education in math, science, and liberal arts will be a differentiator for people competing in the global market place in the future. He quotes Mark Tucker from the National Center on Education and the Economy, "One thing we know about creativity is that it typically occurs when people who have mastered two or more quite different fields use the framework in one to think afresh about the other. Intuitively, you know this is true. Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist, scientist, and inventor, and each specialty nourished the other. He was a great lateral thinking. But if you spend your whole life in one silo, you will never have either the knowledge or mental agility to do the synthesis, connect the dots, which is usually where the next great break through is found."
Where will your next design inspiration come from? A movie? Nature? A poem? A math equation?
