Arts
Listening to this episode is the podcast equivalent of stargazing with someone who loves you… and happens to be thoughtful, technical, experienced, and wildly creative. This week, my husband Daniel, the CEO and Founder of ViceChief , examines the role of light and darkness in the world of a performer… and a prototyper. He cracks into “uncertainty” like a pinata and king size brain candy falls out. His thoughts on asymmetry and the difference between action and reaction will have you thinking twice before you brag about your IG following… or praise someone else for theirs. And as if all that wasn’t eye (and ear) opening enough, Daniel talks directly to the posture and stance that can help you position yourself to deal with challenges and to deliver great work. For Daniel, this posture is not a physical one, it is a conceptual one, and he calls it “Black Sky Thinking”. When you look up what do you see? Where do you stand… and how? What do you move, and why? By the end of this episode, if you still don’t know, you’ll have a great idea of how to find out. Quicklinks: More of Vice Chief here: https://www.instagram.com/vice_chief/ Transcript: Intro: This is words that move me, the podcast where movers and shakers, like you get the information and inspiration. You need to navigate your creative career with clarity and confidence. I am your host master mover, Dana Wilson. And if you’re someone that loves to learn, laugh and is looking to rewrite the starving artist story, then sit tight, but don’t stop moving because you’re in the right place. Daniel: Hey movers, Dana asks everyone to introduce themselves. I’m Daniel and I do prototyping, opto mechanical prototyping. That means designing and building the first version of some new idea. In my case, ideas that have to do with light, optics and mechanical stuff. Think cameras, microscopes, anything with a lens. I’m not here to tell you about prototyping or my path through life, but rather to tell you what I’ve learned in the practice of prototyping, about three ideas that come together in kind of an interesting way. Uncertainty, posture, and asymmetry in that order. Prototyping is a long way from dance. About as far as you can get, actually. If I move something, I move it with motors, not muscle. I choreograph deliverables, not bodies. When I tumble I’m usually tumbling around a CAD model on screen. Prototyping is all about uncertainty and especially reducing uncertainty. I mean, if you knew exactly what to do, you just wouldn’t make a prototype. You would never need one. This is a particular problem in my mind for creatives, because by definition, you can imagine doing lots and lots of different things for any challenge. So what’s the right thing to do. If you were like a simpleton and you could think of only one thing to do, you wouldn’t need a prototype. You just do the one thing that you could think of. So having a creative vision, seeing a hundred possibilities in every challenge means that the odds are actually stacked against you like a hundred to one. This is one of those clear and kind of contradictory cases of every strength also being a weakness, a hundred great ideas as at least 99 nos or even thousands If you consider combinations of ideas. Uncertainty, doesn’t just come from having too many choices. It can also be from having too few. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in engineering, it’s that at any time, if someone tells you that you must choose between A or B two things, they are deliberately not telling you all the choices. For example, simplest thing, you can just say no to both or often better, you can say yes to both. That’s four choices in every dichotomy, minimum. Prototyping as a practice, clumsy, as it is, is about keeping an open mind. And partic