THINK INSIDE THE BOX

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Absurdity: Steve Leveen’s Doorway to Innovation

Saturday, December 1st, 2007

FIRST IN A SERIES
A Guest Essay by Steve Leveen, CEO and Co-Founder of Levenger

Leveen other boxes

WHEN THINKING ABOUT HOW PRODUCTS MIGHT BE DIFFERENT I like to imagine absurdities. I like to imagine the worst way to solve a problem. Imagine something you know couldn’t possibly work. But then, just for fun, pretend it does work and a few years from now you’re explaining in to someone who is standing beside you agog.

Okay, let’s see if I can give an example.

Let’s say you’ve been given the task of designing a completely different way for people to enter and exit a new public library for the city of Phoenix. There’s a need to save air conditioning, which is part of the advantage of revolving doors and sliding doors. But the client wants something different — something that will make people smile and talk. It has to be perfectly safe and as easy to maintain as standard doors. It can cost more initially, if the library board feels it’s worth the price. This is a library that stands for the future of learning and the library director is enthusiastic about new ideas and she is willing to take a crazy concept to the board.

Okay, let’s be absurd!

How about making people step into canvas sacks and hoisting them over a wall?

How about a people-sized doggie door, hinged from the top?

How about an optical illusion that makes it appear that people walking through the portal disappear only to reappear on the other side?

How about no door at all but just an opening that’s filled with a sheet of water that, when someone approaches, instantly vanishes and then reappears?

How about nothing but air that you walk though? Somehow rain stays out and air isn’t exchanged. When you walk through you just hear a little swoosh — it’s like magic.

Now, let’s pretend that the last particular absurd thing is true. Explain it. How does it work? Most of the time, absurd ideas remain absurd, but other times they become realities. Think of flying. Think of escalators. Think of microwave ovens.

As you engage in this process, you exercise your mind by running it back and forth between a childlike land of make-believe, and a grownup, knowing world of the future where you explain something to the child that is you.

How childlike can you be? And how grownup? That’s the fun as you stretch your imaginative powers.

– Steve Leveen

BEST 3 OUT OF 5: QUESTIONS FOR CREATIVES

BEFORE STARTING LEVENGER with his wife Lori in 1987, Steve Leveen worked in marketing for a software firm in Boston, as a survey researcher for a consulting company in Washington, DC, and as a journalist for McGraw-Hill in New York City. Steve’s articles on the human side of technology have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe and The Christian Science Monitor. He holds a B.A. in biology from the University of California, San Diego, and master’s and doctoral degrees in Sociology from Cornell University. Steve is the author of The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life (Levenger Press, 2005) and conducts workshops on the topic for organizations.

I’ve known Steve for about seven years, though as an avid Levenger fan I, well, some might say “stalked” him for about five years before that. From the beginning I was struck my Steve’s fearlessness in product development. He is the quintessential “reinventor” in my opinion. He’s also a wonderful writer, a genuinely nice guy, and an entrepreneur dedicated to living a “life of ideas.”

I asked Steve the same five questions I’ll be asking each guest contributor to my “Other Boxes” series:

How do you define creativity?

When did you first think of yourself as “creative”?

What’s the most recent thing you’ve experienced that struck you as especially creative?

What amazes, confuses, or frustrates you about the creative process?

Who personifies living a “life of ideas” for you?

Each guest gets to choose their favorite three to answer. Here are Steve’s responses, his best three out of five:

What’s the most recent thing you’ve experienced that struck you as especially creative?
Better sugar packets — the long, skinny ones that pour more sweetly than the clunky old rectangular ones. I delight in simple but profound changes to objects we touch every day. Somehow these humble objects exist for decades without drawing our attention and then, abracadabra, some creative person blows holy design breath on them and the world is a better place. Another example are those new curved shower curtain rods. To whomever gave us more roomy showers in such a deft move, I salute you! We should erect a public fountain in your honor.

What amazes, confuses, or frustrates you about the creative process?
I’m amazed when products that have supposedly been made obsolete, somehow haven’t been told they are obsolete and keep getting better. Examples include bicycles, candles, and stick-shift cars. Step backwards with products and sometimes you go forward.

Who personifies living a “life of ideas” for you?
We should read in order to act. I know of no better example than Martin Luther King, Jr. In college he read “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” by Thoreau. In graduate school, he read Gandhi’s works. Then he used non-violent demonstration to change America and the world for all time.

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