Week 2 Reflection Post
After reading How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity by Ed Catmull, I thought it was extremely interesting how Pixar focuses more on hiring people with talent and room for growth than people with good ideas. I had always thought that people with talent were the ones with good ideas, but this article taught me that this may not always be true. By choosing to hire people who are unique and talented, Pixar is able to ensure that not only can their employees come up with good ideas, but that they can also visualize and make the ideas reality. I have also always thought of creativity as the ability to come up with something original in an artistic sense (ex: drawing something new or in a new style), but Catmull says that “in filmmaking and many other kinds of complex product development, creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working effectively together to solve a great many problems.” By bringing people with various backgrounds together, Pixar is able to not only create art in the form of their films, but also through new technological and team designs. Catmull also says that “[c]reative power in a film has to reside with the film’s creative leadership,” and while this is something that makes a lot of sense, I realised that many companies don’t follow this guideline. For example, I have heard of many musical artists not having control over their music, with their corporate management team instead making most of the decisions regarding a new album. This doesn’t make sense to me, especially since the consumers of any artist enjoy and look forward to the specific artist’s thoughts and music, not media created by someone else.
While reading How Samsung Became a Design Powerhouse by Youngjin Yoo and Kyungmook Kim, something that really stood out to me is the battle between efficiency and innovation. I always believed that the more efficient a process is, the easier it is to run and improve the process. However, Samsung showed me that it is also far too easy to allow a company’s products to stay stagnant: they still had a consumer base, but their technology wasn’t improving much, and their products stayed almost the same. Even though Samsung was a company with good profits, by prioritizing efficiency, the company held itself back. In order to become the influential company that it is today, Samsung needed to focus on innovation/design and be willing to try something new. The company’s decision to support internal designers rather than hire well known designers also played a huge role in that it resulted in Samsung having its own “brain,” made up of people who had Samsung’s best interests in mind. The benefits of this were clearly seen when An Yong-Il, the design strategy VP in the late 1990s, tried implementing a design philosophy that summed up to “Inspired by humans, creating the future.” Samsung executives rejected his idea, saying that they were interested in short term profits made by selling immitations of other companies’ products, but instead of just leaving, Yong-Il got his PhD and used what he learned to improve design at Samsung.
Model (Topic — How can we reduce the usage of plastic?):
