Iconoclast (S) Dominique Sciamma 
WORKSHOPS Bell Labs December 2, 2009: Producing the invention Telecom ParisTech.
PREAMBLE regard to creativity - and here considered in the context of "invention" and the multidisciplinary - I would first like to clarify that only as a practitioner that I am speaking. He is not here for me to do science (and even less of the "say"), but rather to try to induce, from a creative experience, but also an educator, how a creative process is developed, promoted, initiated, and shared.
To recoup the purpose - creativity and multidisciplinary approach - I would first, the risk of sounding immodest, describe my own journey, to the extent that, unable to better define myself as a creative, I try in my own experience and rules which exceed usefully inform the theme of this workshop.
A CREATIVE JOURNEY mathematician, but also theoretical computer scientist by training, I always worked in the field of new technologies. Within the group Bull, I first had a software engineer working on very large system, before joining the research center of the first group to work on the parallelization of scientific programs, then a language of Artificial Intelligence (Prolog
).
at that time I designed and developed an innovative environment for logic programming on windowed MS-DOS (Xilog -1984). This environment has become a product within a product line I was asked to take care, within an entity of "advanced products." I then took the marketing department of this entity (product specification, sectoral studies, and communication).
I then created and led for two years, a business unit based Singapore, dedicated to selling products and services of RNs in South-East. I oversaw a parallel AI lab in the French Singapore Institute. Back from Asia, I joined the Directorate for Strategy "group, where I participated in a study on convergence" IT, Telecom, Entertainment before leaving to join EDS, SSII U.S. GM subsidiary.
Within DHS, I first created and led a team of consultants / engineers dedicated to solving complex problems (scheduling, planning, resource allocation) based on technology from operations research, and AI. We were in the mid 90's, when the media began to gain momentum, and the Internet to show the tip of his nose.
My vocation is in fact secret "telling stories", the Multimedia struck me as the bridge between technology and narrative allows me to both exploit and develop technological expertise and a very strong desire for narrative. While throwing me then in writing and multimedia rich media, I become parallel Editor's Electronics business newspaper "La Tribune
. As editor-mail, I design and put up the first website daily, first understand economic information portal as the CD-ROM archive online, which gives the time - and automated - the entire newspaper at noon each day. I journal. As an author
(multi / multi) media, I understand the interface of the Larousse Encyclopedia, numerous websites, scripted several multimedia titles, designs video games for various platforms (PC, consoles, phones), scripted comics communication projects and cartoons.
parallel with this activity author, I developed and sold from 1999 environmental management and multichannel publishing content (Rexpublisher), to produce and publish content in different media.
Finally, I created in 1998 the Department of Multimedia Strate College Designers , originally dedicated to the introduction to writing Interactive, which since 2007 has metamorphosed into a major department (S YSTEMS and Interactive Objects ) dedicated to the design of smart objects. Now permanently embedded in the Graduate School of Industrial Design, I follow-up ( creativity and research) of all projects diplomas 5th year since 2002.
OF THE MULTI-disciplinary to multi-disciplinary
What I seek to illustrate in this tedious endless inventory (poetry less) is that my journey was multidisciplinary. There are probably a compulsive aspect to certain personalities to touch everything (often referred dilettantes), paradoxically interested in without touching the master in all territories of expression very different. There is no claim here to play Pico della Mirandola, but to multiply the perspectives and models, to exploit them, just in the creative process.
This shift towards a multidisciplinary multidisciplinary begs the question of the relevance of the same condition as only multidisciplinary necessary and sufficient for the emergence of the invention, or at least, the question of the need for individuals with a multidisciplinary approach to exploit the full potential of a multidisciplinary team. These figures are not they the necessary mediators between experts in each discipline? Does she not the establishment of common areas of communication, translation, vocabulary, concepts, theories? Believe it is also perhaps a trap, namely the sustainability of a model of separation of knowledge and its articulation, which is perhaps itself antithetical to the process of invention of the XXI century!
Indeed, the structuring of scientific knowledge and its applications, coincided with the rise of industrial societies. The goal of these companies was schematically extracting coal, steel production, build factories, themselves producing a new kind of objects: the "products". All political, social, economic, was based on "separation", the "specialization". In epistemological terms, this separation saw the birth of "disciplines" separate, even competing. Where previously, men roamed and explored different knowledge, but also differentiate, new chapels were high, and also affirmed their dogma.
The structure of scientific teaching, applied mathematics, or engineering - as embodied in our preparatory classes, and our engineering schools - are emblematic of an industrial society where the pyramid is the partitioning rule between knowledge and between actors.
Building on a multidisciplinary would then, in this case, try to amend a moribund system, structurally unsuited to the new creative post-industrial societies. The Multidisciplinary would be "good" - because only - answer, always in this analysis.
Beyond this epistemological discussion, where multidisciplinarity is ultimately a stopgap, or an obstacle to the invention, there is also the question of authority and legitimacy of actors involved in collective processes of invention. To stay
in criticism of the separation of knowledge and its consequence, there is the posture of the expert and authority - formally or de facto - it gives him. France is also a world champion in this category. The hierarchy of the major schools defines the looks from those who are facing on their (dis) similar to the "high" as "down". This is completely antithetical to any proposed collective invention! How could something new out of an organization where the right to speak would depend on his body home? This hierarchical multiple kills any initiative because it makes illegitimate, and no initiative, no invention. Beyond
Originally a graduate from a discipline, be an expert, gives the recipient an 'authority', which gives its word, its territory, a weight that is the "true" and hence the unquestionable. Discipline becomes a hunting ground, a territory where can intervene (and again) that the co-discipline, but which are excluded (or even worse exclusive) all other members of the team.
discipline must be understood as the "rule", which delimits which protects one who is positioned, and that is all the more inventive he knows there will never challenge.
My position, as my experience leads me to go and trample the flower beds of others - and more so that we may, in a multidisciplinary approach, be grown in these areas, enough anyway to see objects, concepts, issues and trends. In doing so, we can then make proposals, especially since they are issued free by amateurs, "dilettantes". It is also necessary that organizations work (static, dynamic) allow these made of words, and more importantly that people allow themselves to do so.
DARING! DARING!
For the best critic of our creativity, the best goalkeeper of the existing temple, it is ourselves! It is too easy to blame only the organization of knowledge and power, because the individual has within himself the means to undermine, if not delete. How an innovation, invention, can it emerge if individuals do not speak, pencil, or keyboard? How relationships between technology, process, market, target, can they arise if the intelligence, imagination, sensitivity, beliefs, fears and emotions of individuals are not put in motion and not speak? Beyond this proposal somewhat declamatory, and therefore useless as it is, it involves identifying the means to do so. I would like to develop this list and a few words, simple but powerful and symbolic, that contain in them the rules of freedom and creativity. These words are methods, which for my part I exercise daily, for the worse as for better, for the benefit or detriment of both projects and people around me.
Immodest: Create it be immodest. Any value system is a prison because
imposes limits to the action, but also with the thought. Let us remember first that we are in the field
thinking, creative unimplemented for now. Challenging a value system, or more generally taboo, no consequence in a brainstorming session, apart from possibly offending convictions. Innovation requires freedom from diagrams, representations, theories. For beyond
morals, or the only value systems, it is certain that we observe with our knowledge, our models, our representations, our theories, even the passive acceptance with them, when questioned are unconsciously experienced as not otherwise prohibited.
Presumptuous: create is being presumptuous. Afford to make proposals, including on areas where we are not legitimate (see above). Do not fear the ridicule of the incongruity, naïveté, or the penetration of open doors (early February to Strate!). Always thought capable of producing unique and original proposals from materials that are not controlled, and precisely because we do not control. The other advantage of this presumption is to shake the expert, to force him to position themselves, even to rediscover his own knowledge because enlightened or challenged in a new light, or near, these singular propositions, concepts or knowledge of foreign and strange.
Ironic: create is to take nothing seriously. Taking something seriously, is necessarily refrain from contradicting the question, and therefore to innovate. Humor is a powerful weapon in creativity. Exercise consistently critical sense (at the risk of hampering its sickly relatives) on a proposal, a system, a situation, is a weapon of mass creation, allowing offsets, word games and ideas, the destabilization of systems, and thus their movement.
Disrespectful: Create dictates it be disrespectful, arguments of authority, expertise,
rules. Believe nothing, consider everything. Do not consider disciplinary boundaries as barriers of thought. Do not consider hierarchies of knowledge, and thus of power, and thus allow himself a position, initiative, proposal, speech, released and free of rules issued by authorities of power and knowledge.
Iconoclast: Create first destroy it. Destroy our beliefs, our prejudices destroy, destroy our representations, destroy our theories. If human perception is a formidable prison, because of physical and structural limitations of our senses, man has free himself by constructing representations of the world, from animism to quantum mechanics, descriptive models to predictive models. But upon release from prison perceptual, man has built a new prison even more daunting it is much larger and not often one sees the walls. Confuse the representation of the world with the world itself is an anthropological original sin, and therefore universal, which "scholars", the experts are the first to succumb. In doing so, they refrain all original look at the object of their knowledge, as with any object in the world. Theories require us readings that often sterilize our creativity inducing relations, orders, associations, uses that become mandatory. And when I talk about theories, I do not mean that abstract knowledge, but also representations, images, and objects. Before being a material thing, the object is a theory which embodied nature merges with use, forcing us to read, and consequently prevents us to see otherwise, thus limiting the field of possibilities and therefore our creativity . Our relation to images is no different, which is built around narrative grammars equally imperative. So clearly our freedom to play whatever we want with the objects of the world - whether material or knowledge - we deliberately castron, while nothing on the merits can we impose, if it does is our tendency to stabilize and secure this world.
However, stability and security are antithetical to creativity, by definition, destabilizing and unsettling. So we need to be creative, critical, make down, destroy our representations, our worldviews, and be literally "Iconoclasts," the image breakers, refusing to worship which are only tools, and preferring to scrutinize and question the world they are supposed to open and not covered. Nothing better sums up all of these keywords as the term "iconoclast".
Destroy, lay down and contesting representations, theories, knowledge and power is the foundation of all true creative process. This act of destruction, breaking into pieces, is an act of separation, both content creator separated as tensions between them. This iconoclasm, this art of "separation", has also a name in science: analysis and a cousin in philosophy: the dialectic.
ABOVE THE CONSENSUS! It is clear that the creative, as described above as being steeped in asocial qualities, is an actor who is anything but consensual. It is instead permanently disrupt the consensus, that is questioning what is accepted as common, which is acquired, and therefore what can not a priori be called into question. If science is consensus (which is common sense), is constructed consensus, it evolves, does not change, only widens when one falls on its boundaries or its inconsistencies, as part of its exploration and exploitation, and its measurement.
But do not invent science is feeding on them. It is therefore not that what consensus is that science (that of experts in a multidisciplinary team) induces a kind of enslavement in their lighting and their links. It is precisely the role of creative and break the temptation induced, and create disorder in the questioning of the consensus.
Politically, morally, ethically, socially, epistemologically, the creative is by definition wrong, since it respects nothing. More technically incorrect, it is even incorrigible.
MEDIUM AND MEDIATOR
The portrait of creative iconoclast might seem not very constructive if it stopped there, and rightly so. The creative can not only be the iconoclast, or, to speak more methodologically, an analyst who furiously cutting issues, situations, propositions, and reduced parts for them on the common area of reflection. If his creative process begins with the act of separation, his creative act is revealed in the relationship set of all these elements. In this respect the creative is really a dialectic, artist separation and meeting.
These are obviously the same "qualities" listed above, that the creative will to serve the linkage. He owes nothing to lose his iconoclasm in this process, quite the contrary. Since the time of the meeting is basically that of the invention. But if
iconoclasm is a method, it is not a machine. In fact, if the act of invention was mechanized, this workshop would not object, and machines would work well thought of invention for us.
If methods are attempting to exist (Triz), the fact remains that the act of creation is literally an act alone, emerging from uncontrolled process, but in any case caused as provocative. Looking back on my own journey leads me today to try to analyze the mental states in which I am, where I sit, in a creative process. As a member
Team tracking degrees Strate College Designers - also multidisciplinary team - and as my classmates, I am every month each of the future graduates, first on their memory and then design their answers, and more specifically on research and creativity. It's been 9 years and that this happiness lasts, which led me to follow 400 projects. When I try to characterize the mental state in which I am in these moments of listening, questioning, proposals, I can not find the image more evocative than "Medium." In fact, I find myself in a sort of state second of consciousness, blurred, where students come about, float, that I do not focus on them (in the dark, so, definitely). Somehow, this blur is a blur cognitive. This involves taking the distance with what we require ideas, they clarify what they entail, look for a different, more holistic. This review blurry to associate different ideas because their fuzzy look alike, and congregate. Associative processes are then initiated, which will emerge new ideas.
Nothing exists but null verbalization is performed. Verbalize can however be reduced to a formal words. Verbalize it's also about free issue, ie to give the right - shameless, presumptuous, ironic - to say anything, no limits, no taboo. This freedom of speech requires not only from the speaker a form of immodesty, but also a form of impunity, that is the assurance of not being judged through and what it emits. Because it emits is free, meaning that it does not offer reading system in the world, or he denies that of his interlocutors. He simply plays, and any game is free.
The paradoxical principle of such a permanent and collaborative creativity is one of absolute respect for each other and could be expressed thus: we respect so that we can all say, without consequence . Therefore, the expert must also not only going into this game, but also be assured of the respect of his peers in invention. He does not think he is questioned personally, but just that it participates in a game of equals free.
As such, any player creativity, whatever its status must be able to speak freely, and without fear, being assured that he will not be judged or called later because of her positions or proposals. These words can then free intertwine with others, hybridise, oppose, in a collective game now. For if I mostly far emphasized the role of the individual, and its subjectivity in the process of invention, I would equally stress that this subjectivity and individual behaviors are in the service a collective work. From this perspective, this collective work has not only need but also mediums as mediators. These mediums and these mediators are they the same? And is it desirable they are? We can certainly say that the creative as described here is indeed a mediator as it is a medium and a synthesizer: medium between disciplines, and synthesizer as he verbalizes the proposals. In many respects, moreover, the figure of the designer is the portrait.
TOWARDS A NEW MAGICAL THINKING
As a professional, individual and citizen, I am a passionate reason. I deeply believe it is key to our relationship to the world in all dimensions - philosophical, political, scientific and technical - and more than one key, it provides us with the tools of transformation, and ultimately its control.
It may seem strange, in a workshop devoted to the invention, ie an activity which he is articulate and marry objects born of reason - like theories, concepts, processes or technology - to invoke the medium, is typically irrational. Creativity would be a mysterious activity, born of the clash between two worlds, a priori, non-communicating, and that only a chosen few have the opportunity linking. Somehow, this process would fall under the magic, since reason
would be absent.
I do think that science in its production but also in his promises or hidden, is now reached a point where it allows the emergence of for-sublimated me the reason,
new magical thinking, and that it is central to the invention of today and tomorrow. This new magical thinking allows us to we, inventors, to dream before reality, dream to fruition. It is therefore to reverse the process mental dominance of the invention - very shared by all the engineers of this land - which is based on technical possibilities to go to the feasible. This process contains within itself the seeds of its collapse, since it starts from the acceptance of a model. In this he is anything but iconoclastic as it allows to think in a very constrained and predetermined.
Reversing the process is rather from what one wants to do, and imagine the ideal solution really (magic) to the problem that arises is, without first worrying about a minute of the how it will be realized. This requires devising uses without worrying about "How
" but just "Why". It does not say "
What can I do with these techie?" But "What I want to offer as a new experience? . Only in a second step we will care about how you approach it, tinkering with metaphors and technologies. This amounts to very classically favor a top-down approach
(uses to techno) and Bottom-Up
(the tech to use).
Such an approach is possible today only because science has not only produced a huge amount of technology, but is also promising technology (especially through nanotechnology). This quantity is thus the source of a huge combinatorial which will hopefully remove the winning combination, ie the one closest to the ideal magic I mentioned earlier.
It is this confidence in the power of science, and thus the reason to eventually provide the technological building blocks needed to build our responses that we can paradoxically to abandon the field of reason to imagine "magically" systems, processes and products like our need.
ADVANCE FOR BREACH
To the extent that "invent" would "create", the invention thus consists of a transgressive act, against the knowledge, models, theories, approaches, rationale, and service of collective progress. The act of transgression is still making reference to consensual models, there is an apparent paradox to challenge them to advance. But where this was previously violent confrontation (in thousands of Giordano Bruno
are unfortunately the evidence), the victory of reason today embodies a science-generating progress, so - dare I say - happy , now allows a confrontation accepted, necessary, and - should he - desired. Human happiness depend more than ever to his company's ability to foster infringement, by allowing its own destabilization set in motion. To parody
Malraux (who did not say that's bullshit), the twenty-first century will be iconoclastic or will not ...
