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BRIAN SULLIVAN: All right, awesome.
I'll try to speak up.
I'm more of a soft-spoken person than some of the speakers.
Welcome.
My name's Brian Sullivan.
I'm going to read something to you first.
It's from the conference.
And it says, "As a professional courtesy to the speakers,"
me, and I guess the rest of the speakers,
"and in compliance with copyright law,
no audio of video recording of the... "
Wow, that's a big typo.
"...of the sessions.
"To request permission, please visit the UXPA
onsite registration."
This session is being recorded, and you'll get to check it out
later.
Thanks for coming.
And we'll go ahead and get started.
What I'm going to do is welcome you
to "Design Like Da Vinci, Collaboration Secrets
from Leonardo Da Vinci's Sketchbooks."
A couple of years ago, I actually started
to get interested in Leonardo Da Vinci's
sketching, because I started to do a lot of design studios.
And it was a really interesting point of clarity
for me, an "aha" moment, if you will,
that Leonardo Da Vinci was one of the most
prolific sketchers around.
And I wanted to see if we could apply that
to design studios.
So that really was the fundamental question
that I was trying to answer.
And when you start to study something like this,
you learn a lot about a person.
And one of the first things that I found out about Leonardo
was he was a mapmaker.
And there's a saying that ancient mapmakers used to say.
Before they went off into uncharted territory,
literally going off the map, they would say,
"Beyond this place there be dragons."
All right, let's look for dragons.
Here's our first map.
This is a map of Istanbul.
The year is 1502.
It is the height of the Ottoman Empire.
This is what we would know as modern-day Turkey.
At the top of the map is the Golden Horn Bay.
This is where they housed their navy that is
the powerhouse of the Ottoman Empire.
And an interesting thing happens.
The sultan of Istanbul makes a strange request.
He wants to have a bridge built to cross
to the northern countries.
And he's doing it for two reasons.
One, he wants to have a lookout for the navy.
But he also wants to open up a trade route
to the countries of the north.
Leonardo Da Vinci hears of this, searching for a patron.
Like any good entrepreneur, he bids on it.
And in his bid, Leonardo produces a sketch and an outline
of what this bridge would look like.
It will be the tallest bridge in the world.
And the specs include a very special type of structure
that will support it from underneath.
It will have two lanes spanning the entirety
of the area, allowing for traffic in and out of Istanbul.
It will be so tall that all of the ships
of that time could sail under it.
It literally will be one of the magical wonders
of the world at that time.
The sultan's engineers look at it.
They review it, and instantly reject it.
Okay, the bridge is too high, the support structure
will not work.
Why would you have two lanes?
It's too narrow at the top.
Absolutely no way this will work.
Interesting thing.
500 years later, it's built in Norway.
Not only did it work, but the arch is the foundation
of a lot of modern architecture today.
The structure underneath it is a basic wireframe
used in most sculptures today.
Instantly rejected by the engineers of the time.
So why Da Vinci, right?
That was the question I found myself asking
when I'm looking at all of these different things
that are happening at the same time.
My name is Brian Sullivan.
You can follow me on Twitter, @bigdesign or @BrianKSullivan.
The hashtag for this particular session is #davinci.
Okay?
I'll try to answer any questions that you have
either after the session or on Twitter.
I work in a usability lab at Sabre.
It's the one that Janice founded years ago.
My coworker Joshua is here.
Go ahead and wave, Josh.
Josh and I work in the lab with several other individuals.
We run about 100 usability tests a year.
Okay, about two a week.
The other thing that we do in usability is we try
to determine how easy something is to use,
how easy it is to learn, uncover kind of psychologically
what motivates people.
We test mainly travel applications.
A few years ago I started Big Design Conference
with some friends of mine.
This is our nerd boot.
You like our nerd boot?
One of the things that struck me first
on Leonardo Da Vinci
was I was reading a book by Tony Buzan
called The Book of Genius.
It's an old book, but it listed ten
of the top thinkers of all time.
Leonardo Da Vinci was at the top.
I'm an English major.
I'd read a lot of William Shakespeare.
I'd actually studied the pyramid builders,
a little bit of Michelangelo.
Thomas Jefferson actually is my favorite president,
and I've read a lot of the Federalist Papers.
But I really had found out that I didn't know anything
about what was considered the greatest thinker
in the world.
And for me, designers, UX professionals,
usability professionals, are problem solvers.
That's what we're here on this earth to do--
solve problems.
Why can't we learn from the greatest thinker
of all time?
So I started to read some books.
One of the first books that I read was from
Michael Gelb.
This book is from 2000, and it's called
Seven Steps to Everyday Genius.
Highly recommend this book.
Fantastic book.
Here are the seven steps to everyday genius.
I'll review them quickly, but I'm going to also tell you
it's seven steps to everyday design.
All right, be curious.
Be constantly learning.
Test your knowledge.
Learn from your mistakes.
Fail fast.
Improve your own experiences.
Make it multisensory.
Think about that for a moment.
Think about tablets and touch, gestures.
We're all going that way already.
One of the things we have to do with all of this complexity
is we've got to be able to embrace paradox,
ambiguity and uncertainty.
And there are examples of it later on, where Da Vinci
was doing that.
Use whole brain thinking, and that's the left side
and the right side of your brain.
Science and art, logic, emotion, extremely important.
We will go over that in great detail today.
Know the physical world.
When I think about that, think about your iPhones
and your Droids.
It's just perfect for your thumb, right?
So think about that, the physical devices
that we have, and use system-level thinking.
When I think about that, what I think about
is the different ecosystems that we have,
be it Microsoft, Apple, or Droid.
That's ecosystems.
Every designer should have these characteristics.
Every problem solver should.
When you're hiring talent, they'd better have
at least five of these seven, okay?
Seven steps to everyday genius.
I want to talk about whole brain thinking, really,
for the rest of the presentation.
It's that left side and right side of the brain.
It's kind of bouncing back between both of those.
That's where the most effective collaboration happens.
It's also the point where maybe the most innovative
and intriguing and inviting ideas come from.
It's that blending of the left and the right side
of the brain.
Around the time I'm thinking of this, all these books
are published, too.
Sketching User Experiences, great book by Bill Buxton.
Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam, fantastic book
on sketching.
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud.
Beyond Words.
All of it's about sketching.
It's all around the same time I'm thinking about Da Vinci,
I'm doing design studios.
Paper, actual sketching paper, is created--
A3, A4, four dot, iPhone, Android, 6-UP sketching paper.
It's all being created.
We're all talking about it.
We have software that mimics sketching
with Sketch Flow and Balsamiq, right?
So we're all talking about sketching and how we can
use that for problem solving.
And we've even developed methods for it.
We have rips, we have 6-UP, we have design studios.
And a design studio, that's where you get a group
of interdisciplinary people, they sketch up ideas
and concepts, critique them, review them, resketch, mashup,
and reach a final decision.
But it's really about that left and right side
of the brain working together, generating ideas,
refining them, honing them, generating, repeating,
coming to one final design concept.
And again, like I said earlier, can we apply Da Vinci to UX,
and especially towards sketching and design studios?
So what I'm going to do is tell you what I uncovered
and what I use when I do a design studio.
I uncovered five sketching secrets,
and then there are four rules that I want to share with you
when you're generating ideas, and four rules when you're
evaluating them, okay?
Before I do that, I want to talk about Da Vinci's true legacy.
I've hinted at this guy was one of the greatest sketchers
in the world.
Many of you know Da Vinci from The Last Supper.
What you may not have known is The Last Supper
took him three years to complete.
He actually had problems completing it.
And I'll talk about that in a little while.
The Last Supper actually captures the moment in the Bible
at the Last Supper when Jesus says to the Apostles,
"One of you will betray me."
And then all hell breaks loose.
You might also know him from the Mona Lisa.
One social scientist said, "This is the most viewed,
most parodied, most sung about piece of art in the world."
Mona is actually short for Madonna.
Lisa was actually the wife of his patron at the time.
The background actually plays significance in this
particular piece, which I'll get to later on, too.
But really, one of the things that surprised me
is he only had 30 completed works of art.
And he was really known to procrastinate, right?
But when you look at his sketches,
that's probably his greatest legacy.
And we don't think of that.
We think about the Mona Lisa, we think about
The Last Supper.
We're going to review his sketches in detail
for the next few minutes.
He had 13,000 pages of sketches.
Big number, right?
Let's put some perspective on it.
You could read the Harry Potter series, Chronicles of Narnia,
Lord of the Rings, Hunger Games,
Game of Thrones, 9/11 Report and the Bible
and still have three pages left over.
(laughter)
Okay?
A lot of pages.
There were 6,000 storyboards in Brave.
He could have done Brave and another Pixar film.
Under each painting is a sketch, which I didn't count.
But just tack on 30.
Look at the pages, though.
And it's anywhere between two and 20 different sketches
per page.
He was the most prolific sketcher in the world.
This guy sketched all the time.
So what lessons can we learn from him?
So one of the things that I did a couple of years ago
was I downloaded his sketchbooks.
I also downloaded the treatises that he had on sketching.
Kind of reviewed those, compared that with what Gelb
wrote in his book, How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci,
and came up with a UX version, five sketching secrets,
which I want to share with you today.
When you go into your design studios,
you need to challenge your designers to sketch this way.
And there's a reason for it, because they'll be
more effective.
Here are your five sketching secrets.
Sketch by hand on separate sheets of paper.
Do your initial sketches alone, then review them later
with other professionals.
Use annotations, arrows and labels.
Save and revisit your earlier sketches.
Those are your five sketching secrets
of Leonardo Da Vinci that can be directly applied
to your UX practice, especially a design studio.
Let's go into a little detail.
My first concept is to use separate sheets of paper.
What you see here is the Codex Atlanticus.
A codex is a wooden box, all right?
In the Codex Atlanticus there are over 1,000
individual sketches from Leonardo Da Vinci.
He didn't have an iPad.
He didn't have Field Notes or a Moleskine.
This type of technology actually existed.
It was called a folio.
He didn't do that.
I think really-- and this is Brian talking--
the bounded pages would have been too constraining for him.
In addition to that, I'll talk a little bit more
about why he used separate sheets of paper.
But use separate pages when you're generating ideas,
right?
Be sure to tell your designers not to use technology
in a design studio, use separate sheets of paper,
put marker to paper.
Here's a design studio that I ran probably
seven years ago.
And you can see separate sheets of paper.
There's markers on it.
The great thing about separate sheets of paper?
You can group them, do a card sort--
what things look alike, what things different.
And then you can cluster them.
After you cluster them, then you can evaluate them.
That's why separate sheets of paper are important.
And the interesting thing is we know Da Vinci
did this, too.
Da Vinci had several sketches on flying.
He had several sketches also on anatomy.
And we know that these were done over different periods of time.
In the Codex Atlanticus he regrouped them.
We know he did this activity.
So here's your first lesson from Leonardo--
sketch by hand.
No constraints, cheap, quick, no special skills.
Don't use technology to do sketching.
You have Balsamiq and SketchFlow,
maybe use that later on.
But initially use sketching by hand.
Secondly, do it on separate pages.
It's portable, you can reorganize it and group it.
So that's your first lesson from Leonardo
to apply to your UX practice.
Next, do your initial sketches alone.
Challenge your designers to sketch alone
rather than do group sketching.
What we do know from Leonardo's biography,
which was done by Giorgio Vasari...
this was a contemporary of Leonardo,
a friend of the family, if you will.
He dissected ten cadavers and produced over 750 sketches
on human anatomy.
But he sketched alone, right?
So he would do the cadaver, work with the cadaver,
ask the doctor, maybe get some technical feedback.
And part of it is just practical, because he was
bloody, it's a mess.
But he allowed time for reflection.
And he would do the sketching, and then he would check back
with the doctor.
Interesting story from his biography.
Giorgio Vasari says that Da Vinci once asked an old man
if he could dissect him upon his death.
And to his surprise, the old man said yes.
Da Vinci held the old man in his arms,
and when the old man expired, the doctor had said,
"He is dead," and the dissection began.
And what Da Vinci wrote in his own papers was,
"I wanted to learn the cause of a sweet death."
Right?
Now, that is really being committed to your art.
Michelangelo also did the same thing--
two artists with the same interest.
So it wasn't really unheard of.
But we'll come back to this a little bit later on.
It was seen as socially repugnant, and it had
a significant impact on you today.
But here's your lesson to apply to UX.
First, sketch alone.
The reason is there's no distractions, you generate
faster, it allows for that space that a lot of us
talk about.
Incubation time, reflection, and just breathing room.
Plus, you avoid groupthink, right?
And I think everyone agrees with that.
I see several heads nodding.
But you have to review with others.
All these anatomy sketches that he did,
there was a gentleman by the name of...
a doctor by the name of Marcantonio della Torre
that actually reviewed the human anatomy sketches
for technical accuracy and completeness.
We also know that the sketches that he did
for his military apparatuses were reviewed by soldiers
and generals at the time.
Review together, though, when you start to evaluate
the sketches.
And the reason you do that is you need someone's expertise,
collaboration, the theme of this conference,
cooperation, consensus, validation and accuracy.
There's a lot of reasons to actually work
with other people.
And we know that Da Vinci did this.
That's your next lesson from Leonardo.
Now, this is pretty basic, but it's important.
Use annotations, arrows and labels.
Da Vinci, a lot of his sketches were actually wireframes.
And you can look at them that way.
Some were works of art, but actually some of them
were really wireframes.
And it's... with... a wireframe at its most basic level
is words with arrows and labels.
What you see here on the left is actually the iconic drawing
of a fetus.
So one of the cadavers that, actually, he dissected
was, sadly enough, of a pregnant lady.
But what you see on the right is any wireframe
that you might have done, right?
Let's compare them.
What we have in Da Vinci's drawing of a fetus,
we have a picture in the center, labels on the top,
annotations on the side, and arrows that point
to key content, explaining in detail something.
And we see the same thing in this wireframe.
We see a picture in the center, a label on the top,
annotations on the side.
A picture is worth 1,000 words, yes.
But words with pictures equal clarity.
Okay, here's your next lesson from Leonardo.
When you're developing a wireframe, be sure that
it's pictures, descriptions, arrows, annotations and labels.
What I have seen done in a design studio
is I've seen a person come in with only words
on a sheet of paper.
That's not a wireframe.
That's a business requirement, okay?
I've seen another person come in with only a sketch
and no words.
The problem with that is later on when you start
to review it, you have no context.
Words provide context.
All right, that's your next lesson from Leonardo.
Your final one is to save and revisit your sketches later.
Some scholars think that Da Vinci used
an early form of the Cornell Method
of note taking.
I'll briefly describe the Cornell Method
of note taking.
That's where you use really about two-thirds of the paper,
which is your main note-taking area.
You have a cue column where you insert tags,
is what I would call it.
So key words.
And then you summarize the information at the bottom.
What you see here is Da Vinci's sketch
of a spike ladder.
He has key information in his note-taking area,
and of course, Da Vinci being left handed,
everything is mirrored.
In his cue column he actually draws a picture of the soldier,
but then has some words.
And then he summarizes what the actual spikes
should look like, okay?
So this is just an example of how he was saving his work
to revisit it later.
The cue column is actually how he sorted information.
So that's kind of a Da Vinci shortcut.
We know that he reorganized his sketches,
and he put most of those key words together.
This is, again, the Codex Atlanticus,
where he did that.
He grouped his weapon sketches together, even though
he drew them at different times.
I had mentioned that earlier.
He did the same thing with the anatomy sketches.
Funny story on the anatomy sketches
is that Marcantonio della Torre, the doctor, actually wanted
to publish that work, but he never got around
to publishing it, because he died of the black death.
One scholar thinks it's because of dissecting
the cadavers.
Technology helps us to group and store stuff today.
So there's a really interesting mashable article
on how Evernote and Fireworks can create a really quick
design pattern library.
Right here on... you see an example on Flickr.
This is Peter Morville's Flickr page.
He's grouped together key sketches and key wireframes
and examples of navigational design patterns
of interactions that he finds interesting.
What you see over here, my good friend Jay Chou
is an artist in Dallas.
And he does what he calls coffee cup pictures.
He groups them together in terms of *** Doo,
Roger Rabbit and so on.
But technology helps us to do this.
Da Vinci didn't have that.
So he did a paper-based system.
But revisit... store and revisit your sketches later.
The reason is you don't want to throw anything out.
You want to be able to cluster things,
make it findable.
And remember the first story that I told you
about the bridge?
It was actually created 500 years later.
Your idea simply may be ahead of its time, okay?
Interesting fact about Thomas Edison.
He created what's called an idea journal.
And it had all of his sketches in it.
The ones that ended up becoming successful,
he would patent those.
But he had an idea journal, paper based also.
So your sketches can become idea journals.
Think of it that way.
They also could become vision boards,
or just there to later on use and reuse, right?
So there's a lot of good reasons to keep your sketches.
Those are the five sketching secrets.
Remember, I told you that I'm also going to talk about
four rules for when you're generating ideas
and four rules for when you're refining them.
I write these on the board at the start
of every design studio, and we follow them explicitly, okay?
Let me tell you what the four rules
for generating ideas are.
So when you're using that creative side of your brain,
rule number one, strive for quantity.
Rule number two, defer judgment,
both positive and negative judgment.
Rule three, seek new combinations.
Rule four, use your imagination.
I'll talk about each one in detail now.
What you see here is really Leonardo Da Vinci's
third great masterpiece.
This is also the solution to a math problem,
and it is also a really good example
of layering.
This is Vitruvian Man.
The Greek scholar Vitruvius said that a man's body
could fit inside a circle and inside a square.
And just for dramatic purposes, I'll step from behind this
and show you what it meant.
If you stretch out and make an X,
you should be able to do a circle,
a perfect circle.
If you get almost in a cross, like, or a T,
it's a perfect square.
Da Vinci basically did two drawings
on top of one another and layered it.
And this is considered to be the iconic sketch
of human potential.
We do know that he created 750 anatomy sketches.
We also know that he had 13,000 sketches.
Innovation scholars predict that it takes about
3,000 raw ideas to have one successful one.
The math works out with Da Vinci.
13,000 sketches, three masterpieces, 750 of which
are anatomy sketches, one of which is Vitruvian Man.
That's why striving for quantity is important.
It leads to innovation.
Quantity also leads to quality.
And the math works out with Da Vinci.
Rule number one, strive for quantity
when you're generating ideas.
Rule number two, defer judgment,
both positive and negative.
One of my favorite sayings from Da Vinci is,
"It's easier to resist in the beginning
than at the end."
And think about that.
After you've started a project and you're moving forward,
resistance sometimes goes down, but initially
you get a lot of resistance.
But what I tell the designers is, "I want you to defer
positive and negative judgment as you're sketching."
And the reason is, get your sketch down.
Here's the issue.
Here's a sketch of The Last Supper.
And Da Vinci struggled with deferring judgment.
Da Vinci tried to position the Apostles
in different ways.
He was trying to uncover their mental model,
believe it or not, get into their heads, if you will.
And he's positioning them in certain ways.
And you'll notice that at the Last Supper,
Judas is grabbing a money bag, right?
So he's the only one that's really grabbing an object.
This is the way The Last Supper looked for two years.
He had completed it except for the face of Jesus
and the face of Judas.
According to his biographer, Giorgio Vasari,
Da Vinci struggled with the face of perfection, Jesus,
and the face of pure evil, Judas.
Okay?
At the church where this particular painting
was being done, the priest said to Da Vinci,
"Come on, man, you need to finish this up.
You need to go on to your next project."
And we don't really understand that today.
Because we think of artists as having this lofty position.
Back then, they would be viewed as almost like a bricklayer,
right?
So he's saying, "Come on, buddy, let's go.
"Finish up, finish up.
"Go to the next job.
Let's go."
And there's a funny passage in Vasari's biography
of Da Vinci.
Da Vinci said to the priest, "You don't understand.
"I can't finish the face of perfection,
I can't finish the face of pure evil."
And the priest says, "Come on, man, you have to.
You really have to move to the next project."
Da Vinci says to the priest, "Look, this is what I can do.
If you want, I can use your face for Judas."
(laughter)
"And I can move on."
He had no more problems with his boss.
(laughter)
Two years later, he finished it.
Okay.
So this is the deal, right?
So deferring judgment, Da Vinci struggled with it.
So in the design studio, right, if someone's,
"Oh, my God, that's fantastic, great job, Chris,
that's fantastic, let's go with that,"
it shuts everyone else down, right?
You just go with that first or second idea.
So that's how positive judgment impacts your creativity.
Negative judgment is the same way.
If you produce an idea and someone says,
"That sucks, that blows,
what the hell were you thinking?"
it shuts you down and everyone else.
You have to defer positive and negative judgment
when you're creating ideas.
If you can't do that, you will have Jesus and Judas problems
just like Da Vinci.
Positive and negative judgment shuts you down.
It shuts other designers down, too.
Just get a sketch out.
It's a draft.
We can revisit it later, right?
That's your second lesson, your second rule
when you're generating ideas.
Seek new combinations.
I bet many of you didn't know that Leonardo Da Vinci
had a pet dragon.
This also comes from Giorgio Vasari.
And the story goes like this.
His dad wanted to paint a dragon shield
and give it to a customer.
And his son is 12 years old, he's a burgeoning artist,
and he says to his son, "Go ahead, son, and paint
"the shield.
I'll give you some money."
So he assigns that task to his son.
A couple of days go by.
Da Vinci's dad decides to go up and check on his son.
So he walks up the stairs, he's about to open the door
to the room, and this smell is just hitting him.
It smells awful.
And I have a 14-year-old son, and when I go into his room,
it smells like boy, is what I say.
So it's just dirt and grease, and it just smells bad.
Dirty clothes.
And I'm assuming that it's that way
with Da Vinci's dad, too.
He opens the door, and he sees Da Vinci is clapping
and doing this type of stuff.
And he doesn't really know what's going on.
And so he goes, "Leonardo, why don't you show me
the shield that you've been working on?"
"Sure, Dad, no problem."
He shuts this codex that he's working on,
and he goes over to the other corner.
And he, you know, removes the canvas from it.
And there's this beautiful shield, and it's the most
beautiful dragon shield that his dad has ever seen.
And he goes, "Leonardo, how could you have done this?
"This is beautiful.
I can't wait to give it to my friend."
And he goes, "Dad, I've got to tell you something.
I captured a baby dragon in our garden."
His dad goes, "Really?"
He goes, "You want to see it?"
"Sure."
So he walks him over to the codex,
and he opens it up, and his dad looks in,
and he sees this little creature.
And it has the body of a lizard,
the tail of a snake.
It's got some wings on it.
It's got a beard.
And Leonardo says, "Want to see it move?"
Dad says, "Yeah, sure."
He goes... (claps) and it moves.
Here's what he did.
He created a pet dragon out of a lizard
using fish scales, bat ears, a lizard, a snake.
The wings even moved when the lizard moved.
He painted it so it all looked alike,
and, given a couple of extra days,
he painted the dragon shield and trained the lizard
to move when he clapped it.
That was Leonardo Da Vinci at 12.
This is Leonardo's pet dragon.
People came from all over to look at his pet dragon
while it lived.
Seek new combinations.
That's the point.
Here's an example of Leonardo just using
pipe and wood to create a movable bridge.
He just put things that already existed
to another use.
This is the world's first green car, all right?
He used the existing tools and technology of the day,
steering column, rack and pinions,
wheels and cranks, springs.
You could crank this bad boy up and it would cruise
for 40 feet.
But it had no seat.
(laughter)
Seek new combinations when you're doing your sketches.
Do it from existing parts.
Put old things to new uses.
Da Vinci was famous for taking an element
and making it smaller or larger, okay?
So as your designers or as you are designing
your sketches, seek new combinations.
Lastly, you have to use your imagination.
If you want to create anything that's intriguing,
innovative or inviting, you have to use
your imagination.
Da Vinci once said, "Why does the eye see things
more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?"
I think he was talking about himself.
Remember he had Jesus and Judas problems, right?
So he struggled with sometimes getting
into that imaginative space.
And really, when you think about it,
when you're generating and refining your ideas,
we're talking about getting out of the common response zone.
That's why again, rule number one,
strive for quantity, is very important.
When you strive for quantity, you end up going into
that imaginative space.
I'm going to tell you a story about a design studio I did
several years ago.
The young lady was struggling to get to her last design,
and I just told her, "Draw something."
And this is for a mobile app.
So she put a catapult on the mobile app.
Just literally a catapult.
The discussion that we had on that one drawing
was what content could we throw out, what content
could we throw at the user.
We wouldn't have had that if we hadn't got
into that imaginative space a little bit.
We got out of the common response zone for a few minutes.
Here's Da Vinci's flying machines.
None of this technology existed over 500 years ago.
None of it.
Interesting thing, though, is... and you can
YouTube this.
In 2006, scientists took the existing parts
from Da Vinci's time and actually created
a successful Da Vinci glider, and it worked, okay?
Avoid the common response zone when you're generating ideas.
More ideas force you to use your imagination,
again, striving for quantity, which was rule number one.
Let your ideas incubate.
Revisit them with a new perspective later.
That helps out, too.
And again, strive for quantity, defer judgment,
both positive and negative, seek new combinations,
use your imagination when you're generating ideas.
Again, in my design studio, I put those four principles
up front, and I tell the designers, "This is what
we're going to do."
It's not enough to generate ideas.
You've got to evaluate them too, or refine them.
Here are your four principles for refining ideas.
Use positive judgment first.
Consider novelty.
Stay focused.
And redirect yourself as needed.
I'll talk about all four of those now.
Use positive judgment first.
This may be my second favorite quote from Da Vinci--
"The greatest deception men suffer from
is their own opinions."
Social scientists, or actually neuroscientists, know
that we have 65,000 thoughts per day, 65% of which are negative.
That's known as negative self-speak.
So you have about 42,000 negative thoughts a day.
All right, if you have a son, like I do, he will tell you
a bunch of negative thoughts about you,
and it gets pretty rough.
But it's stuff like, "I'm too old,
"I'm not smart enough, no one's going to like this idea,
there's no way this will work."
So even before, you know, you start to evaluate something,
you're picking it apart.
And whenever you present a new idea to someone,
what happens?
They pick it apart.
They think negatively.
And we know that Da Vinci struggled with this personally.
Again, it was Jesus and Judas problems
that I'd mentioned earlier.
I also talked about people just rejecting ideas outright.
And I think a lot of designers and UX people fear that.
There's a lot of fear of the reveal.
Use positive judgment first.
You want to explore the value and benefit
of a potential idea, and you're avoiding the natural tendency
to think negatively initially, right?
That's why this is rule number one.
Use positive judgment first.
Next, you have to consider novelty.
It's not enough to just think positively.
You've got to consider novelty.
Da Vinci once said, "There are three classes of people:
"those who see, those who see when they are shown,
and those who do not see."
And I would add "ever."
The city of Venice once called one of Da Vinci's inventions
impractical.
The city of Venice is famous for two things
in the Renaissance period.
It is a city filled with water, so it floods.
When it floods, people come in and raid it.
So it was very famous for hordes of people coming in.
Da Vinci wanted to create a movable bridge
that had places where water could go through it.
He didn't want to create a dam.
I'm sorry to the city of Venice, but that seems very practical
to me.
They called it impractical.
Pope Leo X, this guy disgusts me.
The reason is he banned autopsies.
Da Vinci's dissections, which he used for his medical sketches,
was outlawed.
Da Vinci couldn't publish them.
The Renaissance period is known as the Age of Enlightenment.
Medical breakthroughs did not happen until 200 years later.
That's how it impacts you today.
The Renaissance period should have been known
as an age of medical breakthrough.
It was not.
And I would argue mainly because of Pope Leo X.
He didn't consider novelty.
Did not consider novelty.
And remember the first story.
The sultan rejected the bridge.
Jared Spool calls this the executive seagull maneuver,
swoop and poop.
You guys know what I mean.
You show it to an executive, they swoop in, poop on it...
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Fly away.
SULLIVAN: Fly away, that's exactly what they do.
Thank you, Brenda.
So don't dismiss novel ideas immediately.
Remember the catapult that I told you about?
Novel ideas might lead to innovations.
Many of Leonardo's ideas were initially rejected.
And again, your idea just might be ahead
of its time.
Stay focused.
Design studios are actually very hard, I think,
if done properly.
Da Vinci once said, "As every divided kingdom falls,
"so does every mind divided between many studies.
It confounds and saps itself."
Da Vinci was a perfectionist and a procrastinator.
One of the first things I said
is he only had 30 completed works of art.
The problem was he was a perfectionist.
And because he's a perfectionist,
he procrastinated.
And it cost him.
He only had 30 completed works of art.
My friend Stephen Anderson is a first-rate designer.
He refers to himself as a recovering perfectionist.
So what I like to do in the design studios
is first off, I make it to where we're not creating
a great work of art.
It's just a sketch.
Let's get something down on paper.
It doesn't have to be perfect.
I want people to remain focused, so I schedule breaks.
Periodically during one of the breaks
I tell them to get out of the room, take a walk in nature.
Da Vinci was known to do that.
He would actually want to get a fresh perspective,
so he would take these long walks
to get a different perspective.
It allowed him to refocus.
You also encounter what's known
as the Da Vinci Dilemma.
Here's a man of many talents and not enough time--
mathematician, scientist, military strategist,
anatomist, civil engineer, artist, sketcher,
and a half dozen other careers, or potential careers.
We have what I would call a technology problem
and an attention economy, right?
And so we are UX designers with all of this information
flooding in.
That's our dilemma that we live in today.
We have one career, but so much information
being bombarded at us, sometimes it's just hard to focus.
This is one of the things that Da Vinci said
on his deathbed, but not his last words.
It's pretty somber.
"I have offended God and mankind because my work
didn't reach the quality it should have."
That's a perfectionist.
To the end, that is a perfectionist.
So stay focused on what's important.
Take breaks, walks, refocus accordingly.
Focus on one thing at a time, and for God's sakes,
don't procrastinate.
Get something down on paper and move on.
It's that fifth, sixth, seventh, eight, 20th version
of an idea that becomes innovative, intriguing
and inviting.
And lastly, perfectionism kills productivity.
It absolutely kills it.
Sometimes you have to redirect yourself.
This is lesson number four when you're refining ideas.
Here's a story late in Da Vinci's career
with these two guys, all right?
This guy on your left is Cesare Borgia.
The guy on the right is a gentleman by the name
of Machiavelli.
Little bit of information about these guys.
Cesare Borgia, son of a pope.
Used that influence or nepotism to become a cardinal
in the church at the age of 17.
Probably killed his brother.
Became dictator of the land.
Survived poisoning.
Killed many of his followers.
Eventually died in war.
And for a short, short time was the patron
of Leonardo Da Vinci.
The other guy, Machiavelli.
Politician for 14 years.
Head of the Florence militia.
Ended up getting thrown in jail.
Wrote The Prince to try to get out of jail.
And in The Prince, that's a way to govern people.
And he says such things as, "The ends justify the means,"
"It's better to be feared than loved,"
"Too much freedom can lead to the soul's decay."
Nice guy.
You might call him a lobbyist today, actually.
(laughter)
And I really, truly mean that,
because he was trying to get out of jail.
He was lobbying to get out of jail when we wrote The Prince.
Borgia specifically says...
or Machiavelli says in The Prince,
Borgia is his example of a good and just prince.
Here's the issue.
Leonardo Da Vinci is caught between a power-hungry dictator
and his cheerleader.
If you ever think you have to deal with office politics,
think again.
So Da Vinci has to deal with this at the end of his career.
What's a guy to do?
I'm going to relate to you a story that happened
during the time in which Da Vinci was under
the brief employ of Borgia.
Story goes like this.
Borgia heard of a potential uprising,
so he got all the dukes that are in the land together
and said, "Hey, guys, let's go to lunch."
And then he pulled a Godfather moment,
chopped off all their heads, put them on spikes,
went about the town, and then stole all their money.
Okay, that's Cesare Borgia.
That's lunch Cesare Borgia style.
He then tells Da Vinci, "Hey, man, I want you to create
a bunch of military weapons for me."
Okay, that was why he hired him.
One recent Da Vinci scholar said it had
a profound psychological impact on Da Vinci.
He was terrified.
And so here you have a person that's a perfectionist
that's now a terrified perfectionist
who has to deliver results to a madman and his cheerleader
that's just cheering him on.
What's a guy to do, though?
He created what's called a hodometer, which is used
by mapmakers today.
And what you see here is a map of the city of Milan
and the map of an area that Borgia was going to invade.
He also created a sketch of Borgia's fortress.
It was said by Giorgio Vasari, the Da Vinci biographer,
that at the time, that it was impenetrable.
It had rounded walls, so it could survive
the direct impact of a cannonball,
the technology at the time.
And it had interior walls also that led to higher positions,
more fortified positions.
He designed a movable bridge.
I showed you a wireframe of that earlier.
Here's the sketch.
Da Vinci, which the weapon making would have been
a source of pride for him, he writes in his papers
that it's a grotesque error.
And I want you to imagine what a madman like Cesare Borgia
would have done with a glider, a crossbow, a tank,
a cluster bomb, a machine gun, a helicopter,
a hand-cranked catapult, and that's just to name a few.
And some of these actually worked, okay?
Some of them actually worked.
Da Vinci redirected, right?
One of the first ways that he did,
it was very passive-aggressive of him.
He built defensive items,
things that couldn't hurt people--
the map of Milan, the map of Imola.
A hodometer, which is what you use to accurately map,
still used today, a movable bridge,
the improved ladder, a fortress redesign,
a spike ladder, stuff like that.
Nothing that would really hurt people.
He does write that, "I will not publish nor divulge such things
because of the evil nature of men."
He then stores it in the Codex Atlanticus.
That's where most of his military sketches are.
Final words of the greatest thinker of all time,
"I have wasted my hours."
And then he dies.
Pretty somber.
I hope I haven't wasted your hour.
(laughter)
But what I do know is that you cannot avoid
office politics.
It's impossible.
But you can maintain your own values to the end.
Leonardo Da Vinci did it.
You can design under great duress.
You just have to redirect yourself occasionally.
And you can do it in several ways, right?
You can do kind of the passive-aggressive way
that Da Vinci did.
He eventually moved on to another patron.
So you could go to another job.
But sometimes you have to redirect yourself.
So here are my final thoughts.
Five sketching secrets of Leonardo Da Vinci.
Sketch by hand, use separate sheets of paper.
Do your initial sketches alone.
Review them, though, for... with others.
You want to get, again, their feedback, their input,
their consensus.
Use annotations, arrows and labels.
They become more usable wireframes.
Please save and revisit your earlier sketches, right?
Your idea may be ahead of its time.
Use whole brain thinking.
The right side, the left side of your brain.
When you're using the right side of your brain,
strive for quantity.
Defer judgment, positive and negative.
Seek new combinations.
Remember Da Vinci's pet dragon story.
Use your imagination, right?
When you're refining ideas, use positive judgment first,
right?
You resist the tendency to think negatively first.
It's not enough, though, to just use positive judgment.
Consider the novelty of a potential idea.
Stay focused on your work.
Remember procrastination of Da Vinci.
And occasionally you're going to have to redirect yourself.
Guys, if you can do these eight things,
I really think you can design like Da Vinci.
And I put these four principles up
in every design studio.
And what I'll end with is
when you go off into uncharted territory,
which I would call the future,
I want you to remember what ancient mapmakers said.
They would say, "Beyond this place, there be dragons."
I'll take questions now.
Thank you.
You guys have been great.
(applause)
Or you can go to lunch.
(laughter)
Yeah, we've got about ten minutes.
Or if you want to go to...
I'm cool if you want to go to lunch.
Yes, sir?
MAN: What do you think about the proliferation
of Da Vinci-inspired stuff on television and in media
right now?
Do you think there's something driving it that's positive,
other than just novelty?
SULLIVAN: Right, so commercialization of Da Vinci.
We were actually talking about that at breakfast.
Brenda... what was...