Who Gets to Be Innovative?

Make it new — but first, make it pay

Chair by Alex P. White.

I have the kind of job that begs an explanation, an explanation that constantly changes depending on who is in the room. Technically, I am an ethnographic researcher working in the field of design research. Colloquially, I talk to people for a living, on behalf of organizations who want to know things about those people: how they live, how they see the world; what added feature or policy change they might want. In other words, I use the tools of anthropology to answer practical questions about how organizations should spend their resources: what they should make or change in order to solve which needs, and for whom. At Stanford, the course I co-teach on this is called, rather aptly I think, “Needfinding.”

I love my job — for reasons too variegated and specific to list in this essay now — but whenever I have to explain it to someone new, there is a part of me, a small rattle-sized homunculus it seems, that shakes and shakes with apprehension. I long for my work to be understood, but to be fully understood is also to acknowledge my place in a system that is questionable on most days. My job does not exist to make people feel seen and understood — though when I do it well, that is exactly how they feel. My job is about inspiring a class of people (“designers”) whose job it is to design things for a market, replete with people (“users”) with the money to pay for said things. Sometimes I work with policy makers, non-profits or even organizations outside of any traditional legalized structure — and on such projects, the user is truly the person who needs the service, regardless of whether or not they can pay for it. But much of the time, “user” is a codeword for an individual one courts in a monetary sense — and seeks to bind within a financial arrangement that keeps the organization alive.

When I say I work as an “ethnographic researcher,” then, most people imagine my job as somewhat proximate to academic research — to, say, bespectacled grad students in lab coats or sweet social work students with clipboards. Those in the know, however, understand that the closest genus for my job is not, in fact, other researchers, but innovation consultants — those brightly-spectacled, polka-dot wearing androids. In some rooms, I am that consultant, inasmuch as I am the ethnographer. On some days, I even play both roles simultaneously. In other words, I do not merely study people; it is also my job to inspire designers to make things to serve the people I study. I don’t work in anthropology — as much as the discipline fascinates me, and I use its tools daily. I work, as much as it kills me to say it, in innovation.

Inflatable by Jesse Seegers.

Well, what is wrong with innovation? Isn’t innovation just making things new — from the Latin for “restoration”? (Can one ever trust a woman whose first instinct is to take a word back to its Latinate root?)

There are actually many possible critiques of a job like mine. Perhaps the least sophisticated is one I heard once, on a date in High Park — that my work is essentially fascist surveillance. (I left that date soon after, leaving him gaping like a parched anarchist fish.) But a more reasonable critique might be that such a job relies upon a dangerous theory of change about the world: that it is fundamentally organizations, even for-profit companies, who create history, who act upon the world — and it is the place of the rest of us to consume what they create, and express our opinions through feedback surveys and the occasional focus group. This critique might be trenchant enough — but, in my opinion, is easily circumvented by a more rigorous account of how history actually works. There is another, even more insidious critique, one that I may never stop wrestling with, and it is this: fundamentally, the field of “innovation” is about separating one group of people from another: those who are creative, brilliant producers from those who are mindless cultural drones. Arguably, human beings “restore” and “make new” every single day. But not everyone gets to be innovative.

“In the wake of manufacturing outsourcing in the 1970s and 1980s, US policymakers had pointed to in-person service work and “symbolic analyst” work as where Americans could still outcompete other, globally dispersed workers (Reich 1991). […] I heard this logic echoed in the hallways at Google as designers discussed the threat of outsourcing to India; they concluded that programming could be outsourced. Design, they concluded, was too “creative” to outsource.”
- Lilly Irani, “Design Thinking”: Defending Silicon Valley at the Apex of Global Labor Hierarchies in Catalyst Journal

I cite above Irani’s article on Design Thinking because, as someone who has taught Design Thinking for many years, I have recognized the traces of the history she cites, as well as their consequences, in the field of innovation more broadly. Irani’s article can be thusly summarized: “design thinking,” that buzzy innovation process best associated with IDEO and the Stanford d.school (where I still teach), emerged at a time when classic product designers in the United States were feeling squeezed by globalization. As much of the traditional work of the designer was being outsourced to Asia, where designed objects were also being manufactured, the American consultancy IDEO responded by codifying the seductive practice of “design thinking,” a five-step innovation process that promised to produce delightful, human-centered product ideas (as opposed to actually make and manufacture them). The people who were to practice and sell “design thinking” were thus the cosmopolitan elite — the mostly-American university graduates whose sheen, smooth optimism and upper-class charm would thus pour the foundation for an empire of think-tanks, consultancies and executive education workshops. These were the creative elect — and for a hefty fee, they could help you unlock the creativity that had been buried inside you, even painfully repressed (!) underneath a mountain of company orthodoxy, societal mores, and legal-esque regulations. Math is Easy, an early Stanford design program t-shirt reads. Design is Hard.

Irani, in the way of all skilled cultural theorists, takes this early artifact seriously and asks: Who are the people doing this supposedly easy math? Her answer, unfortunately, is the “globalized Asian designer” — that person, somewhere across the world, who is now doing the traditional design job; that person whose upskilling has necessitated a new strategy from American designers, who thereby decide to abstract their skill into the dematerialized ether of “innovation.” If Asian designers can make things, and even make them better than we’ve made them in the past, American designers must have something new to offer: they can think.

Photography by Victoria Ling.

Of course, if American designers can think, the rather sickening and familiar implication is that Asian designers… can’t.

I want to be careful here and make a few things clear before I go on. Neither Irani nor I are saying that all design thinking practitioners are racist — nor are we saying that Design Thinking is fundamentally racist. (Some people have argued the latter, by the way — and their arguments are worth reading if you are interested in this field.) What Irani is saying is that Design Thinking emerged in a very particular historical moment, as a particular reaction to global labour markets — and an American desire to differentiate their designers from a new rising group of Asian designers. In christening the new practice of Design Thinking, IDEO and the American designers under its wing drew upon familiar tropes of the innovative, courageous, creative, playful West in implied contrast to the traditional, meek, servile, rule-following East. The brand of the United States, in other words, was central to the brand of Design Thinking. We believe that Design Thinkers can help us, to some degree, because they are American — if not white, then the cosmopolitan elite.¹

This is the part of my job that brings me the most despair. I am lucky enough not to have to teach the classic Design Thinking workshop — the one that promises to unlock one’s natural creativity, unblock the process of innovation, “delight” the customer. (Instead, I and my team work endlessly on re-appropriating the tools of ethnography to be of use to those working on tough, knotty social problems.) But I recognize still that when some of my students look at me, they expect me to deliver on this originary idea — they expect me to place them at the center of the design process as though they are the hero whose brilliance will elevate the common consumer — as though the American designer is the font herself of creativity, the ultimate arbiter of the future. It is a pernicious trope, and one that I find as distasteful as it is dangerous — creating companies like JUUL that peddle nicotine addiction in the form of iconic design.² When we believe ourselves to be the source of creativity, we give ourselves permission to stop listening. And we create things that suit our own fancy, whether or not they suit the wellbeing of the world.

So: to work as an ethnographic researcher in the context of innovation is to make one’s home in a nest of paradox. On one side, I am steeped in the hagiography of the American creative genius — and on the other, I understand that in fact, creativity is fundamentally social, and emerges in response to material conditions. On one side, a Stanford graduate in a suit, pitching the latest doodad. On the other, my grandmother, refashioning Kleenex boxes into flashcards for my toddler-self to learn Chinese. We live in a world in which the first is described as “innovation” and the second is made invisible. In which we pay the privileged for the supposed honour of receiving their half-baked ideas, and dismiss the actual resourceful brilliance of the person who must innovate to survive. My grandmother was never going to be paid as an “innovation consultant” — and that is not for lack of her creativity, but for lack of the language, mannerisms and political know-how that separates one class of people from another.

Photography by Lina Sun Park and David Brandon Geeting.

But is creativity really the realm of the individual? Or is creativity itself a trick of the light, a narrative device we use to retroactively ascribe the capacity for newness to certain imagined actors?

Recently, I found myself discussing tropical fruit on Zoom call with a friend. It was an organizing meeting, but the other participants had yet to show — and we had settled into the easy, almost mischievous rhythm of two workers on an unexpected break. We were on the subject of jackfruit — its odor, almost sickly-sweet, and its festive, familial quality: the pit bowl in the center of the living room, the children and adults all peeling away for the yellow flesh, the entire day lost to the cutting, processing, eating, gathering. A nostalgic sheen covered my friend’s eyes. They said, if I were to get one now, I’d have to make it a whole thing — like, invite people over, buy a bunch of newspaper to cover the floor. They added that their grandfather always kept a pile of newspapers underneath his bed for this express purpose — to be laid out when opening jackfruit, protecting the carpets from the stubborn sap. I don’t even know where I’d get the newspaper for my jackfruit! Or a machete! Hearing this, I thought about the executives at, say, the New York Times — weighing the pros and cons of going digital. Did they think about the jackfruit lost? Almost certainly not. Most likely, they imagined their work as purveying information — and decided that a screen could do just as well.

But it is an innovation to cover one’s floor with newspaper, so that one can open a jackfruit. And the fact that this innovation is encoded in culture does not make it any less brilliant — in fact, one might even argue the opposite: that culture is a series of innovations, a collection of stories, habits and practices invented by a certain group of people in response to a certain set of conditions. Culture exists because at one point, an old problem was solved in a new way, and this solution was so good that we decided to repeat it. And the fact that we are each of us born into a culture is testament to the fact that human beings are indeed naturally innovative — albeit in ways that would confound IDEO, because if this is true, then creativity is too abundant to be lucrative.

Perhaps we tell the story of the creative individual because it is more compelling for a creative individual to send a hefty invoice. Perhaps we dismiss, denigrate, make invisible, the innovative brilliance of the everyday because it is for us too slow, too resourceful, too considerate to be profitable — and creates too little of a distinction between us and our competitors to represent great profit-to-come. But in our hunger to make the world anew, we all too often misunderstand it — believing we understand the purpose of things (a newspaper’s use is to purvey information) when in fact, we cannot see the lush and uncountable ways in which those before us have made a home of this world, the one that already exists.

Do you want to improve the world?
I don't think it can be done.

The world is sacred.
It can't be improved.
If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you'll lose it.

— Laozi (老子) from the Dao de Jing (道德经), trans. Stephen Mitchell³

It is difficult to quantify the loss of the old world — its mysteries, its comforts — even as we celebrate the advent of the new one. Eagerly, we hope for the new class of innovators to elevate us with their work — creating objects and services so perfect that we, in turn, are perfected by them. Perhaps our usage of beautiful objects will in turn beautify us! Perhaps a better designed world will make us better: more rational, ethical, loving, efficient, kind. But perhaps this too, is a story — one just a few decades old — about the Great Designer and his Nietzschean perfection, his god-like balance of rationality and magic. And perhaps this story is embedded not just in a certain history, but in a certain power struggle between nations about whose ideas are valuable.

Perhaps the work of renewing the world was never meant to be outsourced to a certain class of people — and perhaps it is work we can take up again, whenever we like, because we have always known how to do it. We will not be saved by someone else’s ideas. We have plenty of our own.

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If you liked this essay, you might want to quit your job. Just kidding ❤️ You might enjoy reading this essay about the Geocities era of the Internet or this essay on Substack as a medium. As always, the full archive is here.

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Discussion Questions

Feel free to reflect by yourself, with loved ones, with other readers in the comments, or in the weekly reading group hosted by mda.hewlett@gmail.com.

1. Do you believe that creativity is something that individuals have? If so, do you think you are creative? Why or why not?

2. Is nature creative? Why or why not?

3. Have you heard stories about certain groups of people being more creative than others? (Race, gender, place of origin, department, job title…) What helped reinforce those stories? What do you think about them now?

1. Like a pack of cowboys roaming the untapped and unmapped “white space” of things-not-yet-created, we trust these American designers to lead us to water. In a sense, we trust that they actually live in the Wild West — for the rest of us have been hopelessly domesticated, confined to our predictable lodgings and warm meals under a ceiling.

For the most recent iteration of this, consider the Stanford d.school’s updated credo, the 8 Deisgn Abilities, and at their center, the super-ability: Navigating Ambiguity.

Hire us, the d.school proclaims, because when we don’t know the answer, we don’t shrink in anxiety — no, we live in the unmapped, the uncharted! (Meanwhile the truest ambiguities often lie in execution — and most consultants are safely out of the room by then.)

2. A legacy not often acknowledged: JUUL emerged out of the Stanford Masters Program in Design. Can we fully blame the institution for the public health crisis that ensued? —No. But as someone who has taught now at Stanford, I also understand that our institutional and cultural insistence on technological optimism and venture-backed growth often obscure the more crucial questions of care, intentionality and responsibility. The excitement, the buzz, the frantic rhythms of startup life often crowd out the ability to ground oneself in the world, and thereby to do right by others.

It is lucrative to act fast and think later — and Stanford is more than happy to teach in ways that are compatible with ethical neglect.

3. I have a pocket edition of this translation and I thumb through it with a mixture of admiration and guilt. Mitchell’s work is sometimes too liberal — he changes pronouns, even a few lines — but the spirit of the work is playful, comforting. I have had it with me for many years, so Ancient Chinese scholars in my audience, please forgive my usage of this crowd-pleasing translation ;)