For inspiration this past winter, I wrote an illustrated
book of tributes to 21 gifted people who made my life significantly more
interesting than it would have been otherwise. For my Vector portrait of each,
I used a photo source of my subject’s micro expression, a fleeting facial
expression that revealed an emotion behind his or her drive.
The spaces where my subjects worked I think are particularly
interesting because they show how someone excited about bringing ideas to life
can design and create their “dream space” that gives you the freedom and the
time: a room in your house, an office; computer; your car.
No matter how varied my subjects’ workspaces, all settings
provided the opportunity to collaborate, long stretches of time necessary for
concentration, and a cultural requirement to think of how much an invention or
innovation would help others.
Some workspaces were built-in, established by corporate,
military, academic entities that needed solutions to problems as soon as
humanly possible. Company leaders assigned their scientists problems to solve,
or the scientists on their own identified problems and brought their solutions
into being.
AT&T’s Bell Labs gave us the replacement for the vacuum
tube, the transistor, as well as the digital camera sensor; General Electric’s
laboratory, the LED bulb; Texas Instruments’ lab, the microchip; RCA’s lab, the
liquid crystal display; and Intel’s lab, the microprocessor.
The U.S. Military, a famously prolific source of invention,
gave life to COBOL, the first computer program to write in English, and the
Global Positioning Satellite navigation system.
Out of a university basement physics laboratory came the
first electronic digital computer. At another university, two Ph.D. candidates
produced a site where information is readily available by tapping a few strokes
on a keyboard. At a third, a group of roommates in a university dorm, led by a
young visionary, created a social media site that is now uniting all citizens
of the world in friendship.
Individual inventors and innovators dedicated spaces in
their homes as shops or as labs. An actress and self-taught engineer, who
invented a jam proof guidance system for torpedoes, set aside a large room in
her home. Macintosh Computer was born in a garage.
Working in and from their offices, other individual
inventors and innovators set out to solve problems that nagged at them. Because
of a media arts instructor’s concern about the hurry with which material had to
be delivered in a typical classroom, we can now learn in depth any aspect of
the field from her video tutorial online site. A businessman, dismayed by the
number of customers who bought electronic devises they couldn’t learn to use,
established a tutoring service through which you can hire an instructor to come
to your home and make it possible for you and your device to work amicably
together.
I’m hoping my subjects will inspire us all to more fully
engage our imaginations to solve problems, starting with a space dedicated to
our new focus. We can identify a nagging problem, list ways to solve it, choose
the best among the proposed solutions, and then try each one. Who else among
friends and associates would be interested? Invite them to join you.
Brainstorm.
Persist. The man who created Blogger stuck with it even
after his partner deserted. Alone, he posted bloggers’ entries until Google
bought his company.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s advice: “If you just work
on stuff that you like and are passionate about, you don’t have to have a
master plan with how things will play out.”
