Creative exhaust, the power of being open by default: Brad Frost at TEDxGrandviewAve

[Music] [Applause] Thanks so for most of human history the act of creation was a largely solitary and relatively elite endeavor right we think of scribes sitting alone in darkened monasteries we think of geniuses like Vincent van Gogh working alone in isolation on these masterpieces or we think of the creative process of these teams of professionals working together with expensive equipment to produce some highly finished work like a gold record coming out of Nashville or Hollywood blockbuster movie right the barriers that entry for creation were so incredibly high a required literacy required schooling professional training access to materials studio space and that's just actually to make something in order to distribute that to the world you needed access to book publisher or printing press TV or radio station because it's so expensive to create the focus was always on the final product right we only printed the good stuff we only finit of printed the final thing or broadcast the final thing leaving a veil of mystery around the process that led up to that final work and this helped perpetuate this notion that only certain kinds of people can create things and only certain kinds of things can be created and then came the wet and has totally radically transformed nearly every aspect of our society including our creative process the bi-directional nature of the web has given us new meaning new answers those questions of why we create how we create who can create and what could be created in the process the web turns 25 years old this year and Tim berners-lee the inventor of the World Wide Web and the other pioneers of the web we're reflecting back on what made the web such a resounding success it brought up four things first the web is ubiquitous the web is meant for everyone regardless of race religion color creed geography mobile carrier right now the web is meant for everyone that's far and away its biggest superpower it's royalty-free and its decentralized you don't need to ask permission to publish a website you don't need to ask permission to link to another website that's an insanely powerful concept then the last point they made was that it's built on open standards in collaboration openness and big messy collaboration and it's in this collaborative world that I like to immerse myself every day working as a web designer as the web's evolved our tools have evolved we have tools like WordPress medium tumblr that make it just dirt simple for anyone to publish their thoughts and ideas our communication channels have gotten better from email to forums and now Twitter right in our tools for collaboration have gotten a lot better as well think of the magic of Google Documents write multiple authors working together on the same document at the exact same time it's magic right or in the programming world tools like git that allow multiple developers to work on the same piece of software without really having to worry about stepping on each other's toes what this enables is a developer sitting in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania in a developer sitting in Japan to be able to collaborate together on a project I think that that's fascinating taking that a step further we have tools like github which just makes it insanely easy for anyone to open-source their code up open-source their work for other people to use and fix and enhance and extend I just think this is a tremendously powerful concept all brought about by the open nature of the web my friend Chris coiour has a website called CSS tricks where he shares web design articles tutorials and resources and on his site he has a license which he calls his quote super-important legal document which reads I don't give two hoots what you do with any of the design or code you find here actually I do I hope you take it and use it uncredited on a super commercial website you get wicked rich off of it I hope you use it at work and your boss is impressed and you get a big promotion I hope it helps you design a website and that website impresses somebody you think is super hot and you get married and have smart chil babies I hope you use the code in a blog post you write elsewhere and that website gets way more popular and awesome than this one if you feel like telling me about it cool if not no big deal if you feel better crediting it that's cool if not don't sweat it if you copy an entire article from this site where you on your own site like you wrote it that's a little uncool I won't be mad at you for stealing I just think that you're better than that want to see you do better I'm not going to come after you though I'd rather play ball with my dog I want the web to get better and being all Johnny protective over everything doesn't get us there I understand other people feel differently about this it might have semi-legit reasons for protecting certain code design writing or whatever I work on some close source projects myself CSS tricks is one of it isn't one of them go nuts I think that's incredible right that's amazing now it's not that web designers are morally superior to the rest of the world although sometimes it's fun to pretend it's just that we we understand and we rely upon this intense openness and this intense collaboration in order for us to do our work every day we directly benefit from the thousands of people who take the time to stay up late after they put their kids to bed to publish their thoughts our ideas share their code and their designs with the world and they do this without any expectation of financial gain or fame or fortune I think that this open openness and altruism is is very much baked into us as human beings but we now finally have a medium with which to express it and I feel like the web design world understands this the most because they're the ones helping create the medium that allows for this collaboration to happen in the first place and I get terribly excited whenever I start hearing about this open mentality start to pour out into other aspects of society in other industries but I still feel like we have a really long way to go I was recently talking with somebody who works at a giant hospital that does a lot of cancer research and they were telling me that their donation form that allows people to donate money to cancer research they bumped up the font size of their donation form and found that by doing that they increase their donations by 20% I was like wow that's incredible that's that's amazing like did you share that that's amazingly insightful they said well I'd like to but we're not allowed to because they said that it would cause us to lose our competitive advantage competitive advantage curing cancer competitive advantage corine cancer right what the hell is wrong with us right so I think that we need more examples of things being done openly more information being shared by default recently my wonderful wife and I have been starting to work with the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank to redesign their website they're a phenomenal organization working hard to end hunger in southwestern Pennsylvania and beyond and it's so incredible to work with such a legitimate organization and and because they are so genuine we thought that it would be great opportunity to do the entire design project updating their 8 year old website with a brand new design so that's exactly what we're doing so we have sort of a timeline that sort of runs through our progress and shares all of the documents all of the design materials all of our everything with the broader world everything from the first tweet that put us in touch with each other whoever says to about your lunch doesn't lead to anything that's exactly what I was doing whenever the Pittsburgh Food Bank got in touch with us which is awesome through to our contract sharing that right our initial design explorations and even the website itself and how it sort of slowly evolved and increased in fidelity so you can sort of see how progress is being made over time and all the while we're sharing our thoughts and our process on our blogs and we're open sourcing all the code that were that we're creating for this so the big question though is why why do this why why put yourself out there like this and know anybody that makes something you know you know what an uncomfortable idea it is to share some some of your work before it's finished right that's a really uncomfortable concept and also it just encourages a lot of extra work but then it has tremendous advantages one it forces you to articulate and justify your decisions that you make but two you're not just sharing with your client you're not just sharing in your own little world you're sharing with the broader community and that community can provide really sound advice and validate and invalidate your decisions and taking that a step further in the web world at least people can fix my stuff and that's incredible and what I've actually found is that in a lot of cases it's actually easier for me to try to solve everyone's problem rather than just my own so whenever I run into something I say hi I wonder wonder if other people have run into this as well and flirted out there and what happens is that all these people who have had a similar problem gravitate together and work on a solution collaboratively and then we're able to take that solution and plug it back into our own work I think that's an incredibly powerful concept and something that's that's really relatively new and lastly you know sort of making this hub obviously gives us a reference to keep coming back to but it also could help serve as a blueprint or inspiration or even a starter kit for another nonprofit another food bank or any other website right lately we've been hearing the term data exhaust a lot what that exhaust is is is the sort of byproduct of our online activity right every day we go online and we check our email and we're opening new tabs and we're clicking on things and we're completing tasks and all the while we're leaving behind this giant wake of data and that data has value and that's the data that big companies like Google and Facebook and apparently even our government are using to target ads at us keep tabs on us and all sorts of other things but this idea that that the byproducts of our of our data has value can be applied to our creative processes right it's creative exhaust can have value these byproducts of the actual final work itself can in some cases end up being more powerful then the work you do I was recently speaking at a conference in New Zealand and after my talk was done I had a professor from Paris come up to me and she goes hey Brad how's the Pittsburgh Food Bank project coming and I'm like what is a crazy to literally be on the other side of the world and have somebody understand and know what you're up to back home I just thought that that was incredible and as we talked more she mentioned to me that she made all the materials and writing that we've been producing for this project mandatory reading and studying for her web design students and I'm like oh that's insane right it's a it's especially insane considering the project isn't even launched yet it's not even halfway done so I think that we have a massive opportunity here to not just share our final works but using tools like dribble that allow graphic designers to share their works in progress with the world and get valuable feedback tools like Instagram which my buddy Tom uses here in Pittsburgh he builds classic cars and every day he has hundreds of people flipping out over the quality of his welds it's sort of desired though at this from afar but it's amazing he's sharing his process in inspiring other people that practices craft we share blog posts about her techniques in our processes share case studies about our successes and failures make video tutorials right you can knit a hat but what if you could inspire hundreds of other people to knit many more hats giving things away for free our design materials publishing our code on github even if you made a kick-ass meal for your family last night right there's the opportunity now to have you know to inspire other people to use that same recipe to make their own families happy so we're getting at here is it's not about what you do it's about what you enable other people to do I think that this is an incredibly powerful idea what's better increasing donations to your site by 20% or figuring out a way for every nonprofit website in general to increase their donations by 20% recently Pew Research conducted a study as the web turns 25 and that's a very simple question has the internet been a good thing or a bad thing and overwhelmingly just like 90 percent of people are like yeah the Internet has been a great thing I would personally love to meet this 6 percent of people that said that the Internet is a bad thing well access to the sum of all human intelligence in my pocket my finger test sucks right ridiculous [Music] the web is this amazing tool that helps facilitate the very things that society needs in order to flourish openness communication collaboration I consider myself to be extremely fortunate to be a part of the medium that helps make those things happen I personally can't think of better problems that have than the then the help sort out what the web is where it can go who can reach how it gets used and why it matters so much so I'll leave you with three pieces of advice work hard don't be an and share what you know thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 14,207

Keywords: Design (Industry), Web Design (Project), ted, TEDx, United States Of America (Country), tedx talks, tedx talk, tedx, Pittsburgh (City/Town/Village), ted x, ted talks, ted talk

Id: 7rW9vTrN6OU

Length: 16min 10sec (970 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 03 2014

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[u/ily400]

Brad Frost is the most overrated part of the web design community. "Atomic Design," give me a fucking break.