Is Product Art or Science?
One question that has come up since the beginning of tech-powered product creation, is whether creating products is fundamentally art or science?
In my mind there was never really a question that it has always been a blend of both.
There can be real art and beauty in the engineering, real art and beauty in the design, and real art and beauty in the solutions we build, and this beauty can contribute to the value and desirability of our products.
In some products, especially consumer products and consumer devices, art plays a somewhat larger role.
But most of us focus on the science; we start with problems to solve, we have ideas (hypotheses) about what might work, we prototype, we test those prototypes for value, usability, viability, and feasibility, and we iterate until we have enough evidence we’re convinced something is worth building, then we build, test for quality and performance, and push our product out into the world.
I’ve held this general view for my entire professional life. But I realize now that my view was heavily biased due to my education and training in the science side of things, and my very real ignorance of the art side.
As with so many things, I had assumptions about art and artists, most of which I never even questioned, and beyond that, I didn’t even know what I didn’t know.
Until last week, when I read a new book that truly opened my eyes to the world of art and artists, and surprisingly, gave me a much deeper understanding of how we create great products.
The book is The Creative Act: A Way of Being, by Rick Rubin, the 9-time GRAMMY-winning record producer.
The book has generated a lot of interest in the broader community, and quickly rose to the top of the bestseller lists. But I really haven’t heard it discussed much in the product space. In my experience, a book like this comes along once every 5-10 years or so, and I would strongly encourage my product, design and engineering friends to give this a read.
Many of you are probably much like me; I very much appreciate and enjoy art – music, paintings, dance, fiction, architecture – but I would never have suggested that I had any of the skills or talents necessary to create these types of art. Further, I had no real idea how the various types of artists think about and create their work.
In this article I’d like to share how this book has changed and expanded how I view our work in product.
But first, I’ve learned that there are some people in the product community that will grasp at any opportunity to view themselves as some sort of demi-god, so for those people, let me be clear right now I’m not suggesting that you should view yourself as some sort of fine artist, hired to express your unique self through your products.
Instead, I’m talking to those of us that are product creators, such as the engineers, product designers, and product managers on empowered product teams working to solve problems for our customers in ways our customers love, yet work for our business.
One of the biggest surprises in the book was the language the author used to talk about how art is inspired, discovered and crafted. He literally frames the creative work as “problems to solve,” which of course we’ve used for many years in the product world, but was very much unexpected in this context. He goes on to describe the role of “discovery,”1 which he describes as a series of experiments exploring as many ideas as possible, and then the “craft” of fleshing out the work into its final form.
But there are literally hundreds of examples in the book where I realized that the world of art and the world of product are much more alike than I had ever imagined.
Remarkably, I consider about 70-80% of the book as very relevant to those of us that create products. I had no expectations that this would be the case, so this was just a happy surprise.
This is because the author views artists fundamentally as creators,2 and as such, most of us are very capable of creation, and of course product teams are very much creators.
The biggest difference is that artists are creating primarily as a means of self-expression, and we are creating in order to deliver value.
But it’s much easier for me to see now how certain companies (Apple is the most obvious example) work very hard to express in their products the values of the founder.
I decided to read this book because I wanted to learn more about how artists create art. I ended up learning a great deal about how people create meaningful work.
- The use of the term “discovery” was again a surprise, but it is consistent with Ed Catmull’s book Creativity Inc. describing Pixar’s process for creating animated feature films for children.
↩︎ - The author uses the terms “creators” and “makers” throughout. ↩︎
