Yes, “The Campaign for the Accurate Measurement of Creativity” is a Kickstarter for a pencil sharpener attached to a mason jar. And yes, this is pretty silly. It’s also, however, a worthwhile meditation on the role and meaning of creativity in the world of design. Let’s focus on the second part.
Created by design-entrepreneur and visual thinker Craighton Berman, the idea behind the project is that a lot of creative work consists of making and trying things that will ultimately be thrown away. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a physical record of all the work you did after an afternoon of sketching, even if all you have to show for it is a deeper understanding of what you shouldn’t do? By collecting and displaying the shavings from your pencil sharpener, you can quantify the work you did.
Berman’s idea grew out of an experience teaching a design sketching class. While critiquing a student’s work (“it was evident there was a lot of effort, but maybe not much result”), the idea of measuring creative effort by saving pencil shavings popped into his head.
“As a product, it’s quite simple of course—a few sourced parts, a single custom piece,” says Berman. “But in reality it’s much more of a conceptual idea embodied in physical form.” Think of it as conceptual art, but native to the world of design.
This may seem like a fine distinction but for Berman it’s critical. “It was of the utmost importance to me that it be an actual product,” he says. “The medium I work in is ideas—sometimes the end result is a drawing, other times it’s a designed object—but ultimately my intent is that of design, not art. This was the sort of idea that just needed to be physical to be truly understood.”
Design is a discipline born of the industrial revolution. Before the rise of factories and specialized labor, there was no need for designers, only artisans—skilled craftspeople who both thought of and made objects. Once the act of designing an object was separated from the act of making it, designers came into existence. This is the tradition to which the Sharpener Jar belongs. “Mass production makes the idea become much more interesting to me,” says Berman.
The project is a commentary on the current obsession with the quantified self and the rise of rhetoric about creativity in big business. On the quantified self side (think Fitbit, Glucose monitors, the Withings scale, or a pedometer), Berman sees a growing obsession with collecting data “whether it’s meaningful or not.” On the business side, talk of creativity is at once promising and troubling.
“Obviously as a product designer I see this as a good thing, but I also see a lot of irony in the fact that creativity is being hailed as a ‘business tool’, when it’s so inherently inefficient, unpredictable, and unmeasurable,” he says. “Collecting what little quantifiable ‘data’ that comes from the creative process, and using it to quantify creativity itself seems to be an interesting way to bring these ideas to life.”
There’s a lot to be said for actually making the thing. Given that the whole point of Berman’s work is that ideas are cheap and disposable (so many are considered and discarded, leaving only pencil shavings), taking the time to make and sell these things gives the concept a weight it would not otherwise have.
The Sharpener Jar may be a tongue-in-cheek design but it’s still a design and Berman says he had to do some prototyping to make it good. “In the original prototype I designed a custom pencil sharpener, and had it milled from brass,” he says, “I learned that pencil sharpeners are actually extremely precise objects that only work well when the tolerances are perfect.” The final design sources the jar and the pencil sharpener, bringing them together with a custom cut aluminum lid.
The result is an object that works. It’s got the story about how the pencil sharpener ties into keeping track of creative effort, but that story isn’t needed. Strip it away and you still have a nice pencil sharpener. “I’ve had elementary school teachers pledging because it’s a useful object in their classroom,” says Berman. “I like products that can walk that line—in this case it’s definitely an absurdist statement, but still a very functional object.”
On top of all that, there’s just the fact that well-presented pencil shavings look nice. “They’re gorgeous byproducts, and it’s a really enjoyable way of appreciating them,” says Berman, “The act of pencil sharpening is also highly experiential—the sound, the feeling, the smell, the intuitive sense of when the pencil is sharp—Sharpener Jar is a small intervention, but by celebrating this ritual, it changes the experience.”
“That to me is what I love to strive for—a product that has layers,” Berman says, “You can engage with it as a conversation piece on the over-quantification of creativity. You can see it as an aesthetically interesting object that celebrates the aesthetic of the pencil shaving. You can use it as a manual pencil sharpener that will never get lost in your desk drawer.”
“All interpretations work equally well, and that means success to me.”
This Pencil-Sharpener Jar Quantifies Your Creative Output
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This Pencil-Sharpener Jar Quantifies Your Creative Output
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This Pencil-Sharpener Jar Quantifies Your Creative Output
