Innovation or Progress
Posted on September 10, 2007
Filed Under What's New |
I know blog posts should be full of links and conversations but here I’m trying to nail down a few ideas so this is a musing post rather than a conversational one - unless people want to respond!
Although the auto industry enjoys a reputation for exceptional innovation and rapid technological adoption, Chris Bangle, chief of design and BMW Motor Group and the man credited by the trade with revolutionising car design in the 1990s, responds to the question: where do you draw inspiration from, by taking out an old folio sized sketchbook.
He flicks to a page filled with heavily lined drawings and points to an 18th century coach. An hour earlier he explained in detail why a car designer gets frustrated with C sections, the point where the roof joins to the body of a car. There’s no way yet to create an elegant shape out of the drop section of the roof and the up section of the body. Here in his drawing of an 18th century coach, he taps the page, they got it. A hundred and fifty years ago. When Chris Bangle searches for inspiration he finds it in craftsmanship.
Bangle is a “standing on the shoulders of giants” type innovator using his respect for previous generations to drive his innovative BMW designs. There are other factors. Responding to regulation, investing more in the BMW luxury brand, competitive forces. A lively talker, Bangle now in his fifties, constantly observes the physical world, sketching inspirational shapes that appear to turn a coach into a car, a coach with hot wheels.
Jens Martin Skibsted helped change the way people use bikes. He did so by identifying the need for a specifically urban bike that would be strong on braking and acceleration, the two recurrent extremes of non-motorised transport. He made them an instant hit by designing a new biking look drawn from the world of home interiors.
“Interiors have a common language which we don’t see in the outside environment, says Skibsted. “I wanted to use this interior aesthetic and apply it to the outside environment.” That aesthetic allows Biomega, his bike production company, to charge a premium for its bikes. But it also attracts a style conscious buyer and delivers back to them the aspirational satisfaction they get from interior or clothing design.
Without focus groups or consumer questionnaires, Skibsted anticipated also the new environmental awareness of consumers, coupled to their health concerns, and delivered a new lifestyle experience based around non-motorised urban mobility. Here was innovation drawing on intuition and, maybe, plain luck. But then again luck is a large part of innovation, of what works and what does not.
It took architect Frank Gehry a long time before he accepted the commission to produce a hotel in rural Spain. Rumour has it that what tied the deal down was dinner accompanied by a bottle of Marques De Riscal wine from the year of Gehry’s birth (1929). Gehry produced a hotel design in Elciego, northern Spain, that uses gold, silver and pink titanium ribbons for the roof. According to Gehry it simulates the canopy of the nearby vineyards. In reality is is a signature design, destined to be an icon that will attract curious design and innovation addicted travelers to an area that needs more tourist business. It is a design that could only have come from an architect with a license to experiment. It embodies technical innovation with vision and it is above all else different.
These examples are not just statements about innovative minds, though each designer is undoubtedly an innovator. They are an illustration of a new phenomenon, of society driven by innovation as a fundamental principle of its being. In each case innovation gives meaning to the product and our experience of it. Alongside every other element of experience (whether visiting Gehry’s hotel, driving a Bangle car or riding a Skibsted bike) the common element is an emotional response to the introduction of novelty, a quiet passion triggered by the new.
For two centuries or more humans have held the idea of progress dear to their hearts. Now progress is being replaced by innovation. Innovation is becoming all - the defining experience,the common feature of our lives, the policy that drives regions and nations, the engine that drives growth, the mark of our times. What is innovation and why is it so important?
Even in the dark years of the 20th century, through the devastating Imperial wars of the early 1900s and fascism and Stalinism in mid-century, the idea that science, technology and society, indeed humanity, were progressing somehow maintained its vigour.
To argue that society did not progress was an idea regarded ultimately with disdain, despite the many signs that there is no rising curve owned by humanity and that for most of recorded history any scientific, economic and social gains were offset by losses that we were always conscious of and reflecting on. The transition to industrial society? The loss of agrarian community. The massive gains in agricultural productivity in the 20th century? Offset by rising levels of nutrition-related cancers, heart disease and similar chronic illnesses. The rise of the motor car and motorised transport? Offset by environmental pollution and new distortions in wealth distribution.
In fact so flimsy can some of the claims of progress be regarded that the author John Gray concluded when writing about medicine that the main feature of progress was nothing more or less than the diminution of dental pain. Nonetheless on the balance of evidence we believe in progress in almost every sphere of human activity. Or at least we did.
Progress was, according to J.B. Burr, author of the Idea of Progress, “the animating and controlling idea of western civilisation” and it has continued to be so almost to this day. To suggest there are limits to progress, as the think-tank the Club of Rome, and academic Fred Hirsch, did in the 1970s, was a way of courting ridicule. Progress defined the relationship between us as a community and the form of thought that seems to distinguish modernity from the past: science. Just as science appears to progress in a sometimes haphazard way but always going forward so did society in all its manifestations.
The difference today is we are more than at any time since the time of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings ambivalent about the notion of progress. We won’t deny it but nor is it firmly embraced. To understand what’s changing in society and in our mindset we need to understand how powerful the idea of progress has been. The idea of progress has allowed western society to remain a moderately coherent entity, made up of different language groups and cultures that spent over a decade in the 20th century locked in mutual destruction, and that today co-exist with a degree of mutual suspicion yet also with a vague sense of common purpose and identity: the competitive pursuit of scientific and technical knowledge. Right now though there is hardly a Government in the developed world that is not faced with declining interest in science.
That decline is reflected by David Balamuth, Dean of Science at Penn State University, in a plea a decade ago for greater scientific understanding among the general public. “Unfortunately, it’s still respectable among educated people to be ignorant of science,” complains Balamuth. “People still say, “Oh, I can’t do math,” or “I never took physics,” and yet they wouldn’t dream of saying, “Oh, I’ve never read a novel.” That would mark them as uninteresting.”
In Australia, in Britain, the USA, Ireland, France and Germany Governments face declining numbers of science students. But while the idea of progress may have taken fatal blows and the majority of people are more sceptical of science and progress than scientists and educators would like the indications are that in place of science and progress we have a new animating and controlling idea.
In place of progress we have innovation. Uncharted and unheeded innovation has become the new progress, the new philosophy guiding and animating human activity in the west and it is a philosophy embraced by such a wide group in society as to become the new zeitgeist.
When we sit down to ask how significant is this change we might at first think that innovation is simply a variation on the theme of progress. After all to innovate has, theoretically, some of the characteristics of progress. We innovate apparently to make “things” better. On reflection it becomes apparent that innovation is quite different from the idea of progress. Those differences, properly understood, allow us an insight into what the zeitgeist is becoming, for better and worse.
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