The Creative Process – Starts and Re-Starts

The Third Growth Option with Benno Duenkelsbuehler and Guests

Curious about the creative process? How does it apply to innovation and teamwork in general? Enter Nick DeSario, a deeply experienced and talented furniture designer, whose work has been featured in Architectural Digest and Elle Decor. Nick and I talk about the creative process, collaboration, how to blend and pair ideas and influences to bring fresh solutions to sometimes tricky and complex problems.

1:57 - “The creative process… is filled with constant starts and restarts and refresh and retake… you use the expression of ‘shedding your skin’ to start again.”

2:46 - “You’ve got to have a dissociative sort of presence when creating collectively… and then sometimes it’s that perspective that you just didn’t consider that wins the day.”

3:43 - “In an ideal collaborative environment, everybody walks into the room with an opinion, with a vision of how it ought to be done… and most everybody walks out of the room with a different opinion.”

6:27 - “There are certain routines, parts of the process that repeat themselves. But the trick is to not get stale, to mix it up and… start, restart and shed your skin.”

9:12 - “I (as a designer) have opinions about what I think should happen next, through lots of visual data points or what I’m seeing in the world. They (retailers and wholesalers) have Excel. They have proof that this unit sold x units in x months.”

12:21 - “At Pottery Barn Gary Friedman would always talk about when he was at The Gap, the designers would try to make a Polo shirt that’s a little bit different, but it’s still a Polo shirt. You don’t want it to be so avant garde that this is not a Polo shirt.”

16:37 - “Part of your creative process is being an alchemist and borrowing and stealing from everybody… the true path is selectively pairing and blending different genres, periods of history, crafted in just that way, this alchemy, this melting pot of historical things.”

Feel free to reach out to Nick DeSario via email - [e-mail].