A conversation with Valerie Jardon, managing director of strategy at IA Interior Architects, on the importance of taking a scientific approach to innovative in design.
Valerie Jardon, a managing director at IA Interior Architects, believes the chances of creating something completely novel are slim today. Why? Because the world moves so fast, we are inundated with so much information, and everything is stolen and replicated. It’s time, she says, to take a scientific, data-driven approach to creativity in design and architecture.
How do you create a system for breaking down the information you’re seeing?
Jardon: I’m formally certified in strategic foresight, and I’ve leaned into a lot of the futurist ways of thinking over the last few years more than ever. The idea is that you learn from tracking signals around different macro trends, so that you can slowly build and start to explore how they would interact with each other. It allows you to explore the collision of things that may not be obvious or expected. The one question everybody asks is, ‘what’s the future of work look like?’ That question is much easier to answer when you pay attention to what’s going on in the world around us. When collecting signals, I use the PESTEL approach, which is just an acronym for examining political, economic, sociological, technological, environmental and legal trends. I track a lot of different things that may not necessarily be mainstream media, and then start to explore how those different things intersect and impact one another to answer those questions for our clients.
That rigor and that scientific kind of systematic, mathematical approach, which sounds so counterintuitive to creativity, can become very helpful, because it allows you to pull in so many data points but organize them in a way that you’re not inundated by information.
How do you track these future trends?
Jardon: Most people are probably tracking signals, while not even realizing that they’re doing it, just by saving pins on their Pinterest board, saving articles, or saving posts on Instagram. You save it because it appealed to you in some manner, it ignited something in you, and you think, ‘I need to remember this.’ And you save it. But how often do you go back and reference it? The act of saving something today digitally is equivalent to cooking with a crock pot—set it and forget it. The digital dementia kicks in, and we forget to go back and revisit that cool things we found.
To combat that, I put everything into an Excel with links that summarize high-level points, and then I will regularly go back in and start to revisit all the things that I’m tracking. I think about how things can clash or inform one another. It’s not only just the act of collecting them and bookmarking them, but it’s going back and making sure that you have some rigor around how you would work with them and explore them.
What are some examples of ideas you collected that might inform your future design?
Jardon: I definitely look at things happening in the art and science realm. I scour sources with offbeat stories, not the typical stuff. One that I just flagged is this story about Italian scientists who were able to freeze pure light to make it solid for the first time, a groundbreaking advancement in quantum physics. I don’t know what it’s ultimately going to mean for anybody and while it might not necessarily be something that everybody can touch right now, it’s still something that could impact the future down the road.
How can that particular story about light research open up the creative process for design?
Jardon: Off the cuff, you start to look at the idea of being able to turn light into a rigid structure and allowing for an interesting level of fluidity. When I put it back into design, I think, how could that be used to create a different type of canvas? Or used to create different types of separation in space that could be more fluid? Instead of building a wall, you’re building a temporary form out of light.
Automatically your head is going somewhere totally different than what’s possible right now. If a client asks to make the space more flexible, and there was a way to flick a switch and put light there to separate a room, that would be the ultimate flexibility.
Is there resistance to this scientific approach to creativity?
Jardon: Not necessarily a resistance, but it is counterintuitive. I think we’ve been taught our whole lives that you’re either a right brained or you’re a left brained individual; you’re not both. But science has proven that theory wrong. Your brain is always fully active, but certain tasks light up one side a little bit more than the other. Because of that old school way of thinking that you’re either scientific or creative, some people don’t think that they can go together. When in fact, they can inform each other if we embrace it.
There is no wrong way to be creative. It’s whatever is going to work for you as an individual. I imagine if you have writer’s block, you probably go out and try to find something to shake the tree, get it loose from your head and look around the world that surrounds you for inspiration. I just feel like the possibility of coming up with something completely novel is so slim nowadays. Everything is always just a new spin on something that’s already been created. Most of the time, when you see a new creation, you go, ‘I could have thought of that.’ It’s not always about coming up with something that’s totally unique. It’s just thinking about it differently.
What is a good example of something that came out of your analytical process of studying trends?
Jardon: Last year I wrote a white paper about trying to take this whole process and put it into action in front of a client group. We took all of the PESTEL signals I’d been tracking and started to explore how they could interconnect with what we know people want. I like to do different exercises for the clients where we look at the eight dimensions of wellness. What do you need to feel like a balanced individual?
We took the signals, combined everything together and realized that we can apply it to space. What could be an interesting thing to bring into a building when looking specifically at how landlords could bring in new tenants?
We started talking about how education is problematic today. You want to be able to go educate yourself, but it’s expensive, it’s time consuming. And as a result, education becomes a dream for many. A lot of educational organizations have put out massive open online courses (MOOCs), where you can go on and you can find a Harvard professor who has put together a great class, and now it’s free for you to take online.
So what if for one of the building amenities you put together a community-based learning environment? So instead of having just a retail environment on the first floor or a lunch spot that can be shared by everybody in the building, you instead have a space that’s focused on helping people learn?
It allows people to come down and take class together. It allows people to then interact with each other from different companies. Maybe they get to talking, and they learn something that they can bring back to their company. It becomes an educational learning environment that is relying on online, free sources, but in an organized fashion that allows people to benefit from some structured learning style and connection.
What does the future of creativity look like?
Jardon: It is definitely going to continue to be surprising. I definitely see a lot of continued theft and copyright issues, and I think there’s no way around that. But we’re going to be leveraging a lot more technology tools and looking to science to inspire us.
A few years ago, a global trend forecaster, Lidewij Edelkoort said that in all of her work globally, it was the first time she had seen creatives creating the tools they needed to do the work they wanted or that they saw in their head, right? Traditionally, as an artist, if I was painting something, I went and found my paintbrush. I didn’t invent a new paintbrush. She told a story about an artist printing glass using a machine he made and dragged out into the desert and fed it sand. In the sun, it would take the sand and print it out into this glass. It was one of the first times in her years of experience where she said creatives were inventing the tools they needed, rather than only being limited by the tools that they have. And I see the technology aspect of that pushing that even further. So I actually think the future of creativity is really going to be very fascinating.
The whole futurist way of thinking is not new. It’s been around for a long time, and it is continuing to gain a lot of momentum as people search for answers. I think there’s so much that can be learned by it.
One of the coolest things that I think I have learned is that we are the ones creating the future. Design is creating the future. And when we go in and can educate a client and explore what they need, we can then create space and present things to them that may not exist yet in the world. Once they say, ‘yes, let’s do that,’ we’ve changed their trajectory.
I try to remind everybody that we all have the ability to create the future, and we will be more successful at it the more we can diversify our minds and watch the signals.
