Of Insight and Outsight and Serendipity [JMO]
Yesterday morning at the Chicago Ideas Week conference, I felt very grateful to have had the opportunity to present the work that Design for America has been doing in different communities around the United States. I'm always so amazed by and proud of my DFA colleagues and their accomplishments that telling the DFA story is always energizing and exciting!
I will confess right here and now that I was getting feedback and making changes to that crazy slide deck as late as two hours before the conference. After a wretchedly sleepless night at a downtown hotel (story for another time), I was up at the crack of dawn, gulping down lukewarm coffee and still tweaking and trying to articulate the DFA creative process that would translate neatly to anyone who might not have ever heard the phrase "human-centered design."I did something rather typical of me right there on stage at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater and coughed up a word that I had never heard used before to describe the process of developing creative insight by getting outside of your own head and your familiar surroundings--outsight. One word out of a torrent of words that flooded out of me in the ~15 minutes that I was tasked with filling in that forum. One word. Yet, that seems to be the word that resonated, the word most tweeted (Twittered?) or reflected back to me after the talk was over.
Interesting.
So I just had to know. Did I really step in it and make up a brand new word? I just couldn't leave something like that lie there! After I returned home, I fired up my laptop, headed to NU's Library Databases, and began to research.I like serendipitous discoveries and I always have. This word--outsight--is the latest one and may become one of my favorites. No, this is not a new word, but it is rarely used, and never that I can find (thus far) in the design world. Here is what the Oxford English Dictionary ("the definitive record of the English Language") has to say about it:
2. Vision or perception of external things; the capacity to see or observe; (the ability to take) an overview. Freq. in insight and outsight.
And, in a less certain place, Googling for the word provides this definition from Merriam-Webster.com (but no specific citation for the New Yorker reference...boo!)
So there we have it. Nothing is original, yes? But what a wonderful, serendipitous find! Even better than I could have imagined had I found the word in Oxford's beforehand! A "prospect beyond or ahead of something"? Yes! Prospect in the sense of a scene, a view, but also meaning possibility. A way out. For that is what can happen when you get out of yourself and your studio, observe closely, seek to understand the circumstances of a situation instead of relying upon internal scripts and stereotypes or shallow, quick glances. You uncover possibilities. Thank you, Nicholas Breton, E. Fitzgerald, Robert Browning. And excuse me while I borrow your wonderful word and apply it to our desired purpose.
