Hunting for Elegance

Bridge the gap between art and science

If you work at a start-up, this idea can help you bridge the gap between art and science and between your Product, Design and Engineering teams.

Hunting for Elegance

Ten years ago, Randy Pausch (a Professor at Carnegie Mellon, who created the best-selling “Last Lecture” in response to terminal cancer) and I worked out a framework for creative projects that centered on this idea: Instead of calling technologists rigorous and artists creative, a more productive path is to celebrate elegance in everyone’s solutions.

In mathematics, the highest compliment you can pay a solution is to deem it elegant. Art experiences elegance from Minimalism, from the emotional thesis of Abstract Expressionism, and from the intellectual and personal rigor of contemporary and conceptual art.

Engineering elegance celebrates beautiful, artful code and the ultimate clever hack—the work smarter/not work harder joy of a hard problem well solved—and the wisdom of knowing when something should be thoroughly solved and when it should be artfully skirted.

We need a shared language

Without a shared language, it’s too easy to mistrust teams from different disciplines.

For instance, technologists bristle at the idea that what they do isn’t creative and artists hate the idea that what they do isn’t perceived as rigorous.

To make this really work, it isn’t enough to just say something is elegant; you have to teach your co-workers why it is elegant and you had to show them how your solution works.

For instance, an engineer might describe the elegance of an asynchronous callback, and a designer might explain how to use a color script to map emotions to a scene. Digging deeper, the engineer might show a clever way to nest functions, and the designer might lay out the undertone series in partial chromatics of warm and cool tones.

Further, it is fine if some of the methods are beyond mutual expert-level comprehension, as long as the gist of its elegance is communicated in a way that it can be appreciated by both groups.

For example, a designer might not explain exactly why she chose every weight of type in her design, but she might describe the idea of establishing an emphasis hierarchy to show what’s important.

Use it right now

Whether your company or start-up is engineering-led or design-driven, at some point you will need to articulate the thesis of your brand and the story of your product, your purpose, why your company’s work matters, and everyone’s role on the team.

AND while you are figuring out your story, you are going to have to do it across design, product, and engineering teams.

Drop the trap of “creativity” and instead optimize for elegance. It’s not a perfect word in our #shipit world (for instance, how to you balance agility and reliability?), but it’s a start.

When every member of your company—from comms to legal to HR to design to product to engineering to sales to BD and beyond—all start to optimize for elegance, there will be less turf-wars and more solutions.

Looking for specific advice on how designers, PMs and Engineers can get along? Read these great posts from Julie Zhou on Medium.

And if you haven’t watch the video for Last Lecture, do it now and think about what message you would write for your kids (or future kids) if you only had one chance to give one very last talk.

Finally—got an example of optimizing for elegance?
Tweet it to me: @buckhouse