According to Patrick Burgoyne it can - he’s just written a provocative post on the Creative Review blog, claiming that by sitting ‘hunched over their Macs, headphones on, plugged into their own private world’ designers are killing conversation in the studio - and when the conversation dies, so does creativity:

Design studios used to be full of banter – work-related or otherwise. Now all you can hear is the tssk, tssk of a dozen headphones.

Sure, you can still hold meetings and discuss the work, but who ever had a great idea at a “brainstorming” session? There’s something about the appearance of a flipchart that just sucks the life out of a room.

Great ideas come about either when you are busy doing something else – walking, taking a shower – or through talking to another human being.

If you’ve listened to any of the podcasts of my research interviews about managing creative teams, you won’t be surprised to hear I think he’s got a point. Every single manager, director, consultant and development professional I’ve interviewed has said that conversation and interpersonal interaction are essential to the creative process. One of the themes that has come out of the research for me is the idea of conversation as a creative meta-medium, where new connections and ideas emerge that would never have occurred to individuals working in isolation (or with their headphones on).

So should design studios ban iPods? That might be a bit extreme, but just as some companies have regular ‘no e-mail’ days, maybe there’s a case for ‘no-iPod’ days, or a return to the communal office sound system.

What could be better for fuelling the creative tension on a Monday morning than a good old-fashioned squabble over who gets to put their tunes on the stereo?

The next interview for my research into Perceptions of Coaching in the UK Creative Industries was with Ben Demiri, Brand Manager and International Sales and Marketing Manager at SIX Showroom.

SIX Showroom is the collective behind Swear and b store (own brands) and 5 worldwide footwear licenses (Eley Kishimoto, Bernhard Willhelm, Peter Jensen for b store, Henrik Vibskov and Opening Ceremony).

Working with mainly UK designers and emerging design talent, supporting them with distribution and a unique production infrastructure, SIX is the roof of an international operation encompassing London’s b Store which is the international flagship for its line of ‘b’ footwear (formerly Buddhahood), Swear in London’s Carnaby Street, and a synergetic marketing and branding operation.

SIX specialises in the design, development, production and wholesale of fashion footwear collections. It operates a production-sourcing agency in Portugal and in Hong Kong, and has more than 20 agencies worldwide covering all continents, including Scandinavia, France, UK, USA, Japan, Hong Kong, Russia, South east Asia, Italy and Spain.

SIX’s first venture into premium footwear design and production happened with the internationally acclaimed brand Swear founded in 1994, opening its flagship in London in 1996. Since then, the company has evolved, launching Buddhahood in 2001.

SIX has developed close ties with many designers resulting in collaborations to launch footwear for Eley Kishimoto, DIE for Swear, Peter Jensen for b, Judy Blame for b, Bernhard Willhelm and in the recent past, Zakee Shariff, YMC, Burro and PPQ.

SIX now handles all product development, international sales and distributions of the following footwear lines: Bernhard Willhelm, Eley Kishimoto, Swear, b store, Peter Jensen for b store and the last additions to our family, the new Spring Summer 2007 footwear collections for Opening Ceremony and Henrik Vibskov. Read the rest of this entry »

 Interview with Ben Demiri: Download

The old sidebar was getting a bit congested so I’ve expanded into three columns - hope you like the new look. Thanks to Megat for the theme.

In other news, I’ve added a Books + Links page about Creative Careers, and here’s a gentle reminder that I’ll be part of a three-editor Magma team speaking at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival tomorrow, about how we edit the magazine.

I ventured out to Russell’s coffee morning recently - very enjoyable and I can confirm that they let in non-planning types. I still find it slightly surreal meeting ‘people from blogging’ for the first time, there’s a slight feeling of weightlessness, as if we’ve just been teleported down. Plus I couldn’t put the blogs to the faces until I followed the links on Russell’s post (check them out) - I was almost going to type ’so you don’t know who they are until afterwards’ - but if course it’s the other way round, isn’t it?