Collaboration and cross-disciplinary feedback are critical to refining a work of art
During my interactions with ‘design thinking’ practitioners and academics, I have received many responses. Some are outright enthusiastic and see its intuitively collaborative approach as a safe one for all kinds of problems. But skeptics see the term as another new-age invention, something that shrewd consultants use to rob unsuspecting corporates or institutions.
I find parallels in almost all of these conversations to the worlds that creatives occupy – the same proportion of those who quickly absorb any new idea or discovery, compared to the larger proportion who see it as a new fad or Watch anything to be disappointed.
feedback technique
What I present through this essay, however, are the startling similarities that there are in performing arts and design thinking. To begin with, design thinking is a way of describing a human-centered approach to solving problems – product decisions, policy-making ideas, even world peace. Design thinking uses an interesting set of concepts, using a feedback-oriented approach to my stakeholders’ opinions at every stage of solving a problem. After the problem is identified, potential solutions are considered (with a cross-disciplinary and collaborative team), prototyped and tested before implementation. Each stage involves a series of subtle steps, addressing feedback and talking from different perspectives, and achieving the nearly impossible – finding something that suits everyone. Design thinking is now used around the world to engineer products, ideas, corporate processes and even leadership styles.
Historically, from Beethoven to Gershwin, there have been examples of composers who tried to ‘prototype’ on their potential clients before taking feedback and refining the final output. For example, Beethoven, contrary to what we might believe, was adept at striking a balance between what he composed as an artistic expression purely for his own enjoyment. India’s court musicians would undergo several modifications before a composition became a court staple. In many of these examples, cross-disciplinary opinion-makers played a role – scholars, ministers, courtiers and, of course, wives and peers.
While interacting with today’s young generation of music directors in the cinema industry, I get real-time design thinking. Multiple rounds of feedback are guaranteed, and any troubled musician will tell you about the number of people who voiced their opinion on even the tiniest part of their process. Feedback is kept in an almost respectable circular loop with frequent revisions and improvements.
And yet, as a collective, the creative community often finds itself at odds with the idea of ’composing to order’. Colloquially, it is associated with a ‘commercial’ work as opposed to ‘pure art’. Feedback or criticism is often viewed negatively, especially when it comes from a non-creative entity or individual. Are we as a community in danger of forgetting what we are going to do – especially in the performing arts, which seeks audiences and feedback? Would it be wrong to, say, follow a design thinking template for reviewing our work and follow a cross-disciplinary feedback mechanism to refine it? Wouldn’t this allow us to create tasks that actually reach the one we want?
The author is a famous pianist
and music teacher.
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