E "Eddy" Edwards
Yes, this seems to be a basic part of the creative design and development process, but many are the times that inadvertently created stumbling blocks have tripped up even the most creative of teams . . .
The Madman, the Myth, the MUNTZ!
Once upon a time, in a far away and mystical place called Southern California, there lived a Madman by the name of Muntz. And lo, he passed himself off as being a serious weird dude in the new and used automobile and consumer electronics businesses. Indeed: way serious weird even by the standards of that long-forgotten, but still deeply felt, time and place.
Earl "Madman" Muntz: to Southern Californians, his company logo was a familiar sight, a funky, angular little figure, his right hand stuck in the breast of his coat, his eyes insanely wide, and his mouth a frozen, deranged-yet-knowing rictus of a smile. And on his feet, dear God! Are those flayed-topped, proto-Brit Mod Explosion Winklepicker boots? Completing this now all-but defunct image of a happy lunatic is a big Napoleon hat on which, rather than the stereotypical "N" is emblazoned a big "M" for Muntz.
Muntz got his big-time start in the used car racket and eventually took on, in his own curious way, the great Detroit Dynamos by building and selling his own brand of car. In his "early days of TV" used car days, his on-air slogans were, "I buy them retail and sell 'em wholesale -- it's more fun that way!" and "this guy's insane, come take advantage of his crazy prices." Go on, try THAT approach the next time you are wooing a new client. Earl "Madman" Muntz wasn't in the design and development racket, and was probably a real pain in the ass of a guy for whom to work (especially if you happened to be a So-Cal-based, post-WWII electronics engineer. More on that in a second), but he did have a curious, hands-on practice that might be of value today with all bowed, bloodied, but unbroken toilers in the sno-cone sticky fields of themed design and development.
What were the accomplishments of Muntz? Let us count the ways: the most successful post-WWII used car salesman in Southern California; developed the first car stereo system; created the 4-track tape deck (4 tracks? What can I say; I had one and I suppose at least one other sold to Bill Lear, the Lear Jet guy, who was inspired by it to create the 8-track that helped the `70s happen); and, as mentioned, Muntz had his own brand of car, the Muntz Jet (another time he was ahead of the Lear curve: Lear's jet didn't come along for many a year after).
Oh, yeah, and televisions. Madman Muntz sold his own brand of TVs. Cheap ones. Not, "cheap, but really meaning no-frills inexpensive." Rather, cheap as in, "cheap to build, made from cheap parts, based on cheap engineering, to be bought by cheap people."
And here, at long last, is the Madman Muntz elucidation and the set up for the Gordian Knot thing.
Electrical engineers of a certain generation, folks who remember when the transistor was a singular thing and pretty cool, know of the practice of "Muntzing." To them it means the process of cutting away at the components of a circuit, whittling it down to the absolute minimum number of parts that will allow it to still work at some generally "acceptable" level, knowing that when a last cut was too many, when too far was achieved and the thing failed, that defined the threshold of "enough."
When, say, a Madman is in the lead, clearing the over-grown path, snipping away at noxious weeds and endangered plants alike with a pair of insulated wire cutters, it's a real pain in the electronics engineering ass, or so I would well imagine. Reducing it down until it just ain't worth the trouble to be doing it, whatever it is, would seem to be what we are all trying desperately to NOT have happen (see also: "descope," "budget rot," and just about every rant ever to appear here) and not what Muntzing was all about in the long run. Yes, he needed to go too far in his reductions to see how far was to be far enough, as so must we all sometimes.
However, considered as something to be practiced of us, by us, and for us around the soggy Venti-sized cup-strewn charette table and not over the phone by some dull finance chump, is what makes a discussion of creative Muntzing worth the while.
Back to the Gordian Knot: Muntzing In Action!
As mentioned above, it sometimes takes a bit of judicial "trimming" away of superfluous elements, a creative reexamination of the "what, why, when, where, and how," of what is being done to maintain the core idea and to keep the creative process alive.
According to the 1913 edition of Webster's Dictionary (everyone's favorite edition, I know), a Gordian Knot is defined as "an intricate knot tied by Gordius in the thong that connected the pole of the chariot with the yoke. An oracle having declared that he who should untie it should be master of Asia, Alexander the Great averted the ill omen of his inability to loosen it by cutting it with his sword. Hence, a Gordian knot is an inextricable difficulty; to cut the Gordian Knot is to remove a seemingly irremovable difficulty by bold and energetic measures."
Yes, by God! Alexander and oracles! Bold and energetic! Whoop! More coffee!
Here's the familiar scene: all of the unusual suspects, clients, "stakeholders," you and your crack design and/or development team (having, at least for the day, switched to endless drippy cups of coffee rather than crack; don't want to frighten the rubes too early). You're sitting around the charette table, the surface of which is filled with stacks of discarded quick sketches, rolls of drawings, piles of research and inspirational matter, plastic plates with the drying remains of the fancy pastries for which you ponied up that morning. The walls are covered with drawings, blueprints, and flip-chart sheets. The air, what there is of it, is filled with the piquant stink of too many people in too small a room with too questionable ventilation grinding out ideas, polishing concepts, all getting INTO THE CREATIVE PROCESS, YEAH, BABY!
And then, outta nowhere, all of that bad air is sucked out of the room, leaving all and sundry gasping. Not literally, alas; that would be too merciful. No, there comes that moment when someone suddenly realizes that There Is An Insurmountable Impediment To Continuing On With This Project!
"Wait, wait, WAIT a damned second!" this person screams, "don't you fools see? If we do it like that, it'll (fill in the blank: "be too damned expensive," "be too confusing," "never get fabricated and installed on time," "some other roadblock of a nature yet to be defined")! What you've got in mind is completely, epically, systemically WRONG! Feh! A pox on you all!"
Or, words to that effect.
The pisser: they may well be right: to achieve a certain effect, to use a certain type of material, to integrate a certain sort of nifty technology, to bring about a certain theatrical effect, to inspire a certain guest flow, it can easily find you inadvertently creating a process that has erected barriers in your own path, bringing the whole idea to a crashing halt.
The solution: Muntzing
Take a look at what you are doing and as you do, start snipping away a the design stuff that makes life worth living -- the materials, the technology, the effect, the whatever -- and think about what it is that really needs to be done: what is the real story to be told? What is the essential message to be delivered? Divorced of the nifty presentational (or whatever) foo-foo-rah, what is the real, essential purpose of this whatever?
Once that image (pure and simple as it hopefully is) is again defined, there comes the real creative trick: considering how, now without the foo-foo-rah, you can still achieve that essential whatever. Does a trick new technology buy you enough to have to rethink the whole idea? Will guest flow really be too-terribly impacted if the queue widths shrink to ADA maximums? Is it vital that you use real Italian marble in the vestibule surrounding Washington's dentures, or will faux-painted Bend-a-board and an echoy recording of dripping water suffice?
Is doing it the way that you thought would be so damned cool be worth killing the whole thing?
Well, yeah, maybe. I'm certain that as Muntz snipped away at circuits, trying to make that "oops, just one too many" snips, he (or at least the engineers whose work he was eviscerating) saw that, even before that last snip, things had gone too far. Maybe, yes, Italian Marble IS what the show is all about. But certainly not always.
No matter the venue - themed entertainment, museums, visitor center, Flagship Hooters restaurant - we know in our heart's of hearts that the point of this creation is to transform the ordinary into the exceptional for a particular public who don't really give a Muntzed monkey's butt HOW the transformative environment in which they will be investing their time, money, and interest was created. All they want is the "show," the result. Not as sexy, perhaps, when you're showcasing your results in your "Impress" slide show, but certainly something that'll wow `em later when you talk about getting it done and done right.
And that's something at which it is hard to snip away.
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