Specialization can easily become a strait-jacket for designers, directing their mental processes towards a predefined goal. It is thus too easy for the architect to assume that the solution to a client’s problem is a new building. Often it is not!

You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.

The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

This then got me thinking about other examples of muddled thinking... that crop up in the business and design worlds these days (see “MBA Students Have Designs on Innovation” on page 13 of the October 8, 2007 Financial Times). For example: The use of the word “creativity.” Creativity is not a synonym for design. The business community, and some times the design community, too, is quick to imply that design equals creativity. Look it up. It’s not so. Also, the use of the word “innovation.” Same as with creativity; innovation is not a synonym for “design.” Innovation can take place in...accounting or agriculture or...zoology. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with design.

Perhaps most annoying: use of the term "design thinking." When the word “critical” is attached to the word “thinking,” the result, “critical thinking,” is a term that has clear, well defined, and well-understood meaning — certainly in the academic community, if not generally. As a counter example, the same cannot, for instance, be said about the term “art thinking.” This is not a term that can be used in any precise or meaningful way. Why? Because it could mean painting or sculpture; it could mean figurative or abstract; it could mean classical or modern or contemporary. Because it embodies so many contradictory notions, it is imprecise to the point of being meaningless — and therefore, completely understandably, it is not much used, if at all.

“Design thinking” is as problematic a term as “art thinking.” Design thinking could refer to architecture, fashion, graphic design, interior design, or product design; it could mean classical or modern or contemporary. It’s imprecise at best and meaningless at worst. More muddled thinking.

In contrast, an example of simple, straightforward, “unmuddled” thinking is Thomas Watson’s dictum "Good design is good business."

"True creativity in art occurs when the artist is restricted, or limited."

Pride is essentially competitive in nature. We pit our will against God’s. When we direct our pride toward God, it is in the spirit of “my will and not thine be done.” As Paul said, they “seek their own, not the things which are Jesus Christ’s.”

I’m lucky enough to be able to block out a lot of distractions and interruptions, and to spend an unusually large fraction of my working life in a state of flow. To the extent that I’m able to get a decent amount of quality work done, I tend to cite long periods of focused concentration as the reason why.

The Feminists did not look. . . far [enough] ahead; they laid down no rules of conduct. For them it was enough to demand the privileges. . . . And [so] woman today is still searching. We are aware of our hunger and needs, but still ignorant of what will satisfy them. With our garnered free time, we are more apt to drain our creative springs than to refill them. With our pitchers [in hand], we attempt. . . to water a field, [instead of] a garden. We throw ourselves indiscriminately into committees and causes. Not knowing how to feed the spirit, we try to muffle its demands in distractions. Instead of stilling the center, the axis of the wheel, we add more centrifugal activities to our lives--which tend to throw us [yet more] off balance.

Mechanically we have gained, in the last generation, but spiritually we have. . . lost.

If daydreaming slips so frequently from meditation into Mittytation, aren't we much better off reading books? That's a comforting thought for those of us who love reading. I'm a literature professor. Reading for me is both vocation and avocation. What better way to improve my time, I flatter myself. But occasionally while reading I get the uneasy feeling that if I looked in the mirror I would see a child sucking on a binky. And each time I teach Emerson's "The American Scholar" I am stung by words like these: "Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings."