A Dark Joke
Sep, 2025
A Dark Joke — How Design Thinking Could and Should Be Applied to Risks
Over the past year I've been producing a large, collaborative project that sits at the intersection of art, engineering, and staged experience. It's a project we've invested in significantly—financially, operationally, and conceptually—with multiple teams contributing and a fixed public opening on the horizon. My role has been to hold the overall structure: aligning partners, coordinating fabrication, and making sure the work ultimately stands in the world as promised.
What has unfolded behind the scenes has become an unexpected lesson in authorship, authority, and how risk silently travels through a complex creative system. Who gets to direct the process? Who understands the technical and contractual consequences of those decisions? And when experiments introduce delay or instability, who actually bears the cost?
These questions became especially sharp while I was reading a book about open-ended creativity—Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective by Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman. Its thesis resonated with me; the realities of producing this project revealed the part the thesis doesn't address.
Greatness Is Not Planned—But Its Risks Must Be Designed
The book argues that the most important breakthroughs don't come from rigid goals but from open-ended exploration—following "interestingness" rather than a fixed objective.
Conceptually, that's something I've always believed in. I'm drawn to people who want to push materials, systems, and experiences beyond the safe zone. This exhibition was exactly that: ambitious, expensive, intricate, and on a tight deadline. I went in fully aware that real innovation is messy and that some chaos is the cost of doing something genuinely new.
Working with this artist forced me to confront the other half of that equation: what happens when one person's open-ended exploration is built entirely on other people's time, money, and emotional bandwidth. And, more pointedly: what happens when a creative system treats the artist's vision as the only thing worth protecting—while the people who fabricate, coordinate, problem-solve, and absorb the shocks are treated as infrastructure rather than as collaborators with their own stakes and limits.
The Authorship Paradox
Running through all of this was a particular conception of authorship: the desire to claim the exhibition as entirely one's own, while declining any meaningful share of the risk it generates.
What I observed was a strong insistence on total artistic sovereignty—the expectation to sign the work, direct every detail, and override decisions in almost any domain, at any time. That impulse extended well beyond concept and aesthetics into areas like engineering, fabrication, scheduling, and safety: fields where the person insisting on control did not necessarily have the relevant expertise, and did not carry the downstream financial or legal exposure when things went wrong.
The result was an asymmetry:
• Control was centralized in one person's taste and intuition.
• Costs were externalized to others: budget overruns, delays, contractual penalties, ticket refunds, and the emotional labor of holding the team together.
Late-stage changes were justified as necessary for "quality" or "safety," but the material risks—missed deadlines, rework, strained partners—were borne elsewhere. In that sense, the mindset was not simply "I am responsible for this exhibition," but closer to: "I own the glory of authorship; someone else will quietly own the consequences."
Part of my own learning has been to recognize this pattern early and to name it clearly. If someone wants comprehensive control over the work in every dimension, then that control has to be matched by a willingness to share, or even assume, the concrete consequences attached to those decisions. Without that alignment, what presents itself as pure artistic conviction is, in practice, a transfer of burden onto everyone else in the system—people whose expertise, time, and wellbeing are no less valuable than the artist's vision, even if the industry rarely treats them that way.
The Reputation Argument—and Why It Points to a Larger Shift
There is a counterargument here, and it deserves to be taken seriously. An artist might say: my name is on this work. My reputation rises or falls with it. Of course my opinion should carry the most weight—I am the one who will be judged.
This is not an unreasonable position. In traditional models of artistic production, where the artist works alone or with minimal support, authorship and accountability are naturally unified. The person who signs the work is also the person who bears its consequences. The logic holds.
But the work I am describing—and increasingly, the work that defines the frontier of contemporary art—does not fit that model. When an exhibition requires researchers from different fields, engineers, fabricators, lighting designers, scent specialists, and production managers, it is no longer a solo act. The artist's vision may be the seed, but the work itself is irreducibly collaborative. And when collaboration reaches that scale, the old model of singular authorship starts to break down—not as a matter of ideology, but as a matter of operational reality.
I suspect this tension will only intensify. As new technologies expand what art can be—immersive environments, responsive systems, experiences that unfold across time and space—the work will become ever more multidisciplinary. The artist-as-sole-genius model, already strained, may become untenable for the most ambitious projects.
Perhaps the future of art at this scale looks less like the traditional studio and more like film production: a structure where director, producer, cinematographer, and actors are all recognized as protagonists, each with distinct authority and accountability, each with their name attached to the work in ways that reflect their genuine contribution. In cinema, we do not say the director's vision is the only thing that matters; we have learned to hold multiple forms of authorship simultaneously, and the work is richer for it.
This is the systems change I believe is coming—and that I want to help design. The assumption that whoever's name appears on the work should therefore have final say over every dimension of its making is itself the problem. It conflates artistic vision with operational authority, and it treats signature as a license for unilateral control. But in genuinely collaborative work, no single person holds all the relevant expertise, and no single person should bear—or impose—all the consequences. The future I want to help build is one where authorship is understood differently: not as sovereignty, but as one essential role among many, held in relation to the others who make the work possible.
From Compassion to Structure
For a long time, I tried to make sense of these dynamics through empathy alone. I attempted to understand the human motivations—the insecurities, the pressures, the cultural conditioning that might explain why someone would behave this way. I extended compassion repeatedly, interpreting hostility as stress, volatility as passion, and blame as displaced fear.
But there comes a point where compassion, on its own, stops being analytically sufficient—where continuing to interpret behavior solely through individual psychology begins to obscure the structural dynamics at play. Professor Robert Sutton—Professor Emeritus of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford, and a co-founder of the d.school—has spent decades researching exactly this territory. His scholarly work on organizational behavior examines how certain patterns of conduct, once established, take on a life beyond any single person's intentions: how they propagate through teams, how they reshape norms, and how they impose measurable costs on performance, well-being, and institutional health.
What Professor Sutton's research clarified for me is the distinction between understanding a behavior's origins and designing systems that can withstand it. Empathy asks: what is driving this person? Structure asks: what arrangement of roles, phases, and accountabilities would make this collaboration sustainable regardless of individual temperament? The two questions are not opposed—but the second becomes necessary when the first, pursued in isolation, leads only to indefinite absorption of dysfunction.
This reframing—from personality to structure—is what ultimately led me to the frameworks I describe in the essays that follow. If risk migrates toward whoever is least positioned to refuse it, then the remedy is not simply to cultivate better interpersonal understanding, but to design systems where risk is visible, explicitly assigned, and therefore negotiable. That shift, from hoping people will behave well to building infrastructure that functions even when they don't, has become central to how I think about collaboration in complex creative work.
The Structural Question: Who Owns the Consequences?
For a while, the underlying structure looked roughly like this:
• Creative decisions in the studio were made in a highly flexible, real-time, exploratory way.
• The practical consequences of those decisions—delays, rework, financial overages, and contractual exposure—were managed separately, often by people who had not initiated the changes.
Control and accountability were not aligned. The person with the greatest influence over day-to-day decisions was not the person answerable for refunds, guarantees, or reputational impact if we failed to deliver on time.
Once I saw it that way, the conversation shifted in my mind from "who is right in this particular disagreement?" to "what structure would make this relationship honest?"
I realized there were only two coherent models:
1. Creative direction separated from operational control.
The artist retains authorship and conceptual leadership but steps out of day-to-day production decisions. A designated production lead (or team) takes responsibility for schedules, fabrication choices, and coordination with partners—and explicitly accepts the associated risk.
2. Creative direction unified with operational accountability.
The artist not only leads creative decisions but also assumes formal responsibility for the operational and financial consequences—captured in contracts, timelines, and liabilities, rather than only in principle.
What no longer felt tenable was the blurred middle ground: extensive informal authority in the studio, combined with very limited formal accountability when that authority produced friction or slippage.
What I Took Away From This Experience
This project forced me to clarify a few things about how I want to work in complex, high-stakes creative environments:
• Exploration needs a frame.
I still believe deeply in open-ended search and iterative making. But exploration is not abstract; it occurs in real time, with real people, under real constraints. When the process is deliberately fluid, the question is not whether someone absorbs the uncertainty—someone always does. The question is whether we have been honest about who, and whether they have genuinely agreed.
• Control and responsibility belong together.
Whoever has the power to override decisions, dismantle work, or reopen settled questions also needs to be visibly connected to what happens when those choices create strain. Without that link, it becomes too easy for one person to optimize for vision while others quietly absorb the human cost.
• Patterns tell the truth that individual stories can obscure.
Any single incident can be contested and reinterpreted. Over months, however, the pattern becomes more informative than any one explanation. For me, the pattern here was not just operational—recurring rework, mounting pressure—but personal: strained relationships, exhausted collaborators, and a growing sense that people were being spent in service of a vision they had no real stake in shaping.
• Drawing boundaries is a form of care, not an admission of defeat.
Reframing roles—saying, in effect, "either you lead and own the consequences, or you focus on authorship while someone else manages operations"—is not walking away from ambition. It is refusing to let ambition run on the silent, unsustainable expenditure of other people.
How This Shapes My Practice Going Forward
That book about open-ended search helped me articulate why rigid objectives can limit discovery. This exhibition taught me a complementary lesson: that open-endedness, pursued without care, can become a way of externalizing its costs onto the people closest to the work.
I am still drawn to projects where not everything is known in advance, where prototypes fail, and where ideas evolve in real time. The difference now is that I am unwilling to let that openness come at a hidden human price—paid by fabricators, collaborators, or producers who were never given a real choice about what they were signing up for.
The guiding question I carry forward is simple:
When we choose to work in an exploratory way, have we made sure that the people carrying the weight of that exploration actually agreed to carry it—and can actually bear it?
For me, designing those conditions is now as much a part of the work as designing the pieces themselves. Not because I am interested in risk management for its own sake, but because I want the risk-reward equation to be honest. In multidisciplinary work, the consequences are already distributed—whatever the industry narrative suggests, the artist is not the only one whose reputation, finances, or wellbeing are on the line. The fabricator who loses sleep, the producer who absorbs the overruns, the engineer whose months of problem-solving vanish into someone else's signature—they are all carrying real stakes. The question is whether the rewards are distributed with the same honesty. The future I want to help build is one where they are: where what people put in and what they get back are genuinely aligned, across everyone who made the work possible.
