Take a Ride on a Jet Plane
Here at Studio Two we’re contemplating a big step into a new, urban market – potentially opening a satellite office for starters, seeking out new clients and ideas, and forming relationships with talented people. Its a big undertaking that presents a host of challenges as well as opportunities – and we’re doing this during a major expansion in our business here in the Berkshires region, the outgrowth of a long planning and development process we started nearly two years ago.
Which has me thinking about the nature of goal setting and vision. One of the things we have been working on is visualizing our future – really seeing it down to a detailed level and holding those images in our heads and sharing them. As designers, we imagine what we then create – which is an act of goal setting – but we don’t normally apply that model of creativity to ourselves and our own “design” – our futures. A great luxury of that process is that you are free of limitations – if you can imagine it you can describe it, if even only to yourself.
Much like the strongest design product, it takes bold thinking and focused vision to create innovative new ideas and expressions. Bold thinking takes a kind of courage – a leap of faith and a belief in your intuition and experience. One of the challenges of being a creative organization is keeping the thinking bold – finding a routine or process that doesn’t dull the sharp edge but instead lets it cut through the noise to the big idea. It also takes reduction – an editing process of finding the minimal way to a pure ideal. This reduction is often the most challenging aspect for clients to understand about our work – our job is to whittle away the many different ideas and images and cut down to the single idea, the single image.
So I am starting to see that this reduction and creative visioning process about our expansion needs to be brought into the same kind of thinking – we need to find our way through many competing ideas, visions, and assumptions to a purer image of the future – and then we need to hold onto that and pursue it with energy and intention. Stay Tuned.
