Creating Powerful Products (Page 2)

Karen Dietz

" 'Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair'. . ."

5. Discuss the cultural principles and values, which are imbedded in classic Company products.
6. Articulate additional Folklore elements that contribute to the Company's influence.
7. Suggest criteria for a structured knowledge management system for CEI's ongoing activities.

CEI's products can be potent and deeply meaningful. But what else, other than CEI's design principles, contributes to the success of some of the organization's products in a variety of media?

One way to begin to look at CEI's products is to introduce the concept of the 'Affecting Presence.' An Affecting Presence is an artistic expression within a culture that is purposefully concerned with engaging people in powerful meaning, emotions, values and states of being or experience. People take them seriously, whether these Affecting Presences are fun and entertaining (a comedy film) or weighty (the Bible).

There are all kinds of works of art and two distinct categories can be made: works that embody excellence and virtuosity, and works that are both excellent and embody an 'Affecting Presence.'

Works of virtuosity are works that achieve excellence in execution but they stop there. The work of virtuosity tends to be dedicated to the validation of itself whereas the Affecting Work tends to be dedicated to the validation of man (the terms Affecting Work and Affecting Presence will be used interchangeably in this report). The work of virtuosity tends to operate at the individual level, while the Affecting Work tends to be communal. The work of virtuosity moves in the realm of thought and psychology, while the Affecting Work moves beyond to mythical, metaphoric, generational, timeless, experiential and playful performances. Works of virtuosity are often found in galleries where they can be observed, while Affecting Works exist only in performance. The most powerful of Affecting Works/Presences exist forever invoked-- always, in effect, in performance.

An Affecting Presence, or an Affecting Work, touches people so deeply, that it ends up actually residing within them, becoming part of their memory, ongoing experience and a part of the larger culture. Affecting Presences are special kinds of works that have significance beyond the merely conceptual ("I think I like it") -- they in some way move us ("Wow, what an experience!"). Enormous power resides in Affecting Presences. They also own certain characteristics that cause them to be often treated more like persons than things (see discussion of Specialness on page 15).

An 'Affecting Presence' adds an additional realm to the ability to discuss and evaluate whether CEI's products are potent, to what degree and whether past products are more potent than the products of today. CEI may already intuitively know many of these qualities, but they will be presented here in a structured way in order to:

• Build awareness.
• Address any missing pieces.
• Increase overall effectiveness.
• Suggest criteria for building a knowledge management system.

  To elaborate further, Affecting Presences and Affecting Works contain the following qualities:

  1. Fullness
  2. Density of meaning
     • Myths
     • Archetypes
     • Feelings
     • Metaphor
     • Value-laden content
  3. Deep play
     • Experiential
     • Performance
     • Events
     • Blurring boundaries
     • Imagination
     • Evolving meaning
  4. Solidarity and release
  5. Spans generations
  6. Validation
  7. Specialness
  • How CEI treats their works
  • How the public treats CEI's works
  8. Self-supporting
  9. Crosses cultures
  10. Celebration and delight

  These qualities constitute a meta-language and create meta-communication within which CEI's design principles lay. Most of CEI's design principles are the foreground while the qualities of the 'Affecting Presence' are in the background, always operating and affecting. This forms an expanded context within which to evaluate past, current and future projects for CEI, and constitutes the first step for CEI's active knowledge management.

  Now let's examine these qualities more closely.

  Fullness--not wholeness

  For a work to reach the status of being an Affecting Presence, it is important to distinguish between wholeness and fullness. Artists and others can create artifacts that are whole--in other words, they contain all the formal elements that constitute a creative product: a painting, sculpture, song, dance, etc. These formal elements include all the aesthetic, textural and other physical properties that are necessary for a particular medium: color relationships, spatial relationships, form, mass, surface, color, volume, tone, movement, etc.

  All the right elements may be in place, but an Affecting Presence is not the result. An Affecting Presence has a fullness associated with it that is the fullness of meaning. The elements within the work all come together to create a density of meaning that is very contained and forms such cohesion that the work itself transcends the collection of artistic elements that create a work. A work that operates at this level goes beyond the formal excellence of its execution or expression. Think of Michaelangelo's Pieta as opposed to a piece of sculpture in a local gallery. The Pieta connects with its audience on a visceral level of feeling, emotion, values and mythology. It has become an Affecting Presence.

  Density of meaning

  To create this fullness requires paying particular attention to the creation of deep and dense meaning. By deep and dense meaning, we are talking about works that have a multitude of meanings, a complexity of meanings, rather than a meaning that is simple or sparse. A story line can be simple but with rich and deep meaning. The end result is works that engage the imagination, are timeless, and connect to the universal experiences of man. Creating Affecting Presences with rich, full complex meaning involves using the following:

  Myths

  tapping into the deeply imbedded myths within cultures and the human psyche is key to creating a depth of meaning within a work. Myths are dynamic experiential models that give meaning to life, enabling individuals and societies to manage their environments with dignity and value. Myths use a particular language to describe the world's realities, providing for man in a creative, artistic medium the rules for living and moral conduct.

  Myths are constant among all human beings in all times and may even be a part of the structure of our unconscious and hard-wired into our genes. The patterns, stories, even many details contained in myth are found around the globe and among all people. This is because myth is a shared heritage of ancestral memories, consciously transmitted through their telling from one generation to the next. Myth is the thread that holds past, present and future together and is the glue that holds societies together; it is the basis of identity for communities, tribes and nations.

  Because they are teaching tools, myths help to organize and manage feelings and experiences. They are processes of the unconscious, inheritances of all mankind, which endow us with both wholeness and depth of being. Myths have the power to disturb sleep, heal us in ritual, and they move and gratify us. They inform our waking and sleeping hours, and their function in the work of an Affecting Presence is critical.

  While universal in nature, myths can also be translated into ideas particular to a culture. Universal myths occur in fairly stable form from people to people. Examples of universal topics myths deal with are:

  1. Creation of man, animals and natural phenomenon
  2. Union
  3. Separation
  4. Love
  5. Death

  Many of CEI's products incorporate such myths. A brief sample of specific American culture myths imbedded in CEI's products include:

  1. The American West
  2. Small town
  3. Democracy
  4. Rugged Individualism
  5. Progress
  6. Globalism

  CEI and its early employees were masters at tapping into these mythic levels and creating Affecting Presences.

  Archetypes

  these are elementary ideas that can also be called 'ground' ideas. They reside in the unconscious of the individual but they also transcend all cultures. They are major symbols standing for the fundamental realities of the human condition. All over the world and at different times in human history, similar archetypes or elementary ideas have appeared in different costumes. The differences in costumes are the result of differences in environment and history. But despite the differences, the elementary ideas themselves remain universal and powerful. Myths are composed of, and use archetypes in their telling. These archetypes help form the structure, style and meaning of the myth. Some examples of archetypes CEI has used include:

  1. Magician
  2. Trickster
  3. Innocent
  4. Warrior
  5. Hero

  
  

  Value-laden content

  Affecting Presences, besides containing myths and archetypes, are first and foremost complexes of values. They are the potent products of a culture that embody values and their content is value-laden material. Values are qualities or standards about what is desirable which move us to action. They become criteria for decision making and shape behavior. They can operate at either a conscious or an unconscious level in someone's life, and they can operate at either a conscious or unconscious level within an Affecting Presence.
  
  Transmitting values, either individual or cultural, is a key function of any artistic expression of a culture, and definitely of an Affecting Presence. The power of an Affecting Presence is the result of the recognition of felt (visceral) or articulated values at either the universal, cultural, historical or individual dimension, or complexes of these. An Affecting Presence emerges only when the audience is value-involved and when the values, which move them, are immediately available and recognizable. Values are inherently a part of CEI's products and the general public uses values to evaluate those products as either good, bad or indifferent.

  
  

  Feelings

  man's feelings are experienced, expressed, taught and refined though Affecting Works. Affecting Presences are actual presentations of the life of feeling. The emotion of Love experienced in the animated film Bambi is a powerful example of how feelings are deeply a part of an Affecting Presence. An Affecting Presence speaks to universal feelings of love, hate, fear, exaltation, anguish, despair, loneliness and joy. Even after the creators of Affecting Presences have disappeared from earth, these works still confront us. This life of feeling is achieved mainly through the use of metaphor, which is the next topic.
  
  

  Metaphors

  are figures of speech where one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them. We say that computers have senses and a memory, or that we are drowning in money. Metaphors help create vivid pictures in the mind and tickle the imagination. They bring into the mind a series of images, feelings and ideas. A computer is not simply a mechanical device -- it is a brain, a voice, an extension of ourselves, etc.
  
  Clusters of metaphors are responsive to, or evocative of, different classes of feelings and images. Affecting Presences are not simply symbols--they operate at the level of metaphor. Besides containing complexes of myths, archetypes and values, Affecting Presences also typically embody a complex of metaphoric levels, all coming to operate simultaneously within the work.
  
  

  Cohesion

  when an artifact has strong internal or external cohesion (Chart 2), the stronger its Affecting Presence is. When cohesion breaks down, the artifact loses potency, devolving into disjointed pieces that do not move people to the extent that an Affecting Presence does.

  Deep play

  The concept of deep play is pivotal to understanding and creating Affecting Works. Deep play is a concept first named by anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his book The Religion of Java. The concept of 'deep play' emphasizes people's natural inclination to mess with the variation and similarity, conflict and harmony of cultural beliefs. When the artifact is engaged in at the level of deep play, it no longer is an object or noun, but becomes a verb that is active and dynamic. The product isn't just a product it is 'product-ing.' When an artifact becomes a verb, it takes on a deeper and more active meaning. Many of CEI's design principles are elements of deep play. And no matter what a person's chronological age, deep play allows us all to connect with our dynamic child-mind and experience delight, creativity, imagination and magic. Specific elements that create an experience of deep play for people are the following:

  Experiential

  As has been already articulated, an Affecting Presence requires an active participant, audience and the ability to actively engage with the work. A person cannot simply observe an Affecting Presence, he/she must interact with it. It is a kinesthetic experience that requires movement on the part of the audience and engages many senses: taste, smell, seeing, hearing, etc. If direct physical involvement is not part of an Affecting Work, then psychological involvement certainly is, like a film can enrapture us (see Imagination below). Experiencing an Affecting Presence makes it valuable, intimate and believed.

  
  
  

  Affecting Presences are always events instead of being merely objects. By events, it is meant that Affecting Works have an eternal-ness about them that suspends them in time with no fixed beginning or end. They are always happening, if not in someone's present time, then they are operating in the realm of daydream, memory or social obligation. What is the beginning of a film or game? Is it in the anticipation of planning the trip to the Movie Theater or the purchase of the game? Is it when standing in line? Is it when the item is purchased? And when does the film or game end? When the film or game stops and we leave? Or after we share the experience with friends? When we buy a poster of the film or game after we've experienced it?

  
  
  

  Performance

  The meaning and deep play of an Affecting Presence can only be experienced through performance. When the focus is on performance as an essential quality of an Affecting Presence, it is in order to understand not the artifact itself, but the transmission of the meaning of the work through space and time instead. Because an Affecting Work is an event, the Affecting Presence is made known in performance instead of being hung in an art gallery or displayed in a museum. It is dynamic process. Affecting Works are perpetual acts that keep perpetuating--the act ever in the process of being enacted--and ever in the process of being in affect. Even a film, if it has reached the level of an Affecting Presence (such as Gone With The Wind), is in continual performance whether it is at rest or not, whether it is being shown or not, because the Affecting Presence ultimately resides within people. The Affecting Presence becomes a road to follow, a new land to experience no matter how often an individual has experienced the same Affecting Work in the past (see sections 3 E Imagination and F Evolving Meaning).

  
  
  

  Blurring boundaries

  another key characteristic involved in deep play is the blurring of boundaries between a variety of poles:

  1. Reality and fantasy
  2. The sacred and the profane
  3. Sense and nonsense
  4. The mundane and mystery
  5. Routine and adventure
  6. Control and loss of control
  7. Past and present
  8. Present and future
  9. The linear (history) and the circular (story).

  
  
  Shifting boundaries engage us, catch us short, and create deep play. When boundaries are blurred, people experience a sense of freedom and are transported out of simple black-and-white dichotomies, out of rigidity and into the in-between of life where magic dwells. When boundaries are blurred, we stand in the realm of magic where the world is reversed, shifted, multiplied and split, engaging people in continual play. Blurred boundaries and the magic of them allow us to digress to infinity between a fixed beginning and ending, because there are no fixed beginnings and endings. Since there are no sharp lines drawn between living and dead things, the latter, too, can come to life. Blurring boundaries are often breaking rules and mistakes on purpose, the obvious result being the delight of deep play.

  
  
  

  Imagination

  Imagination engages people creatively with an Affecting Presence, providing people an ability to 'play.' It is impossible to see how a work becomes affecting without the active play of a subtle, rich, free ranging and totally adventurous imagination. What makes an Affecting Work affecting is that the imagination is constantly engaged. People are continually able to write their own 'story' using the elements presented in the Affecting Presence.

  
  
  

  Evolving meaning

  Another component of an Affecting Presence's deep play is that the Affecting Presence changes over time as the person who interacts with it changes over time. As a result, the work also becomes an experience of discovery as deeper meanings and learnings emerge as a person grows and develops. People are not simply remembering what it was like to play with a particular product, like Tinker Toys or Barbie for example, when they were ten years old. At some level they are re-experiencing the product, but in perhaps new and different ways. Memory is only one piece of the Affecting Presence experience. This is another experience of continual deep play where meaning emerges over time. People are constantly engaged and the meaning often can deepen and shift depending on age, geography, and life experiences. Affecting Presences and their magic leave the individual fantasizing about whether and how to apply to himself what the story or work reveals about life and human nature.

  Solidarity and release

  Another function of an Affecting Presence, with its qualities of magic and deep play, is the degree to which it brings people together. At the same time, an Affecting Presence also has the power to releases stress, tensions and the tediousness of the mundane. Not only does magic and the Affecting Presence solidify and unify people in a communal experience, it also releases individual and collective stress. Almost all Affecting Presences draw people together and remind them of their unity in a variety of ways. Often the result for participants engaged with an Affecting Work is that tensions are released in a way that allows them to walk away feeling refreshed and renewed.

  Spans generations

  Within Affecting Works, there is not so much a sense of the past of man, of the accretion of epochs, as there is of his continuity. All generations are omnipresent and the landscape of time is ready to be experienced as fresh, ripe and strong. Magic is always present because the Affecting Presence is a confluence of past, present and future. It is a wonder, but no surprise that the Affecting Work may be described as an entity, which though it is native to a time and place, is not the prisoner of either. A nation's flag would be a good example.

  The Affecting Work's power is in the power of time itself, not only the time in which it is enacted, but time-absolute, solidifying the utter continuity of a person, king, state, of a particular people, and of mankind.

  As such, it aids people through the transitions of life. It may seem silly to think of one of CEI's products as a helpful agent during life's transitions such as birth, marriage, career advancement and possibly even death. But in many ways, this is how people consciously and unconsciously actually relate to the Company's products. And we know this to be true when we see CEI's products and/or images turn up at birth celebrations, wedding receptions, promotion parties, and the like. To trivialize such acts is to ignore the Affecting Presence's inherent power. At the very least, examining CEI's products through this lens could lead to some interesting and creative ideas for maximizing CEI's effectiveness.

  Validation

  Affecting Presences and their power validate the nature, history and being of man. Their magical deep play captures and ritualizes man's optimism about life and relationships. Affecting Presences provide man a measure of certainty that all will turn out well in a very uncertain world: . . "and they lived happily ever after;" or "Hey! The thrilling game ended and I'm still alive and whole!"

  Specialness

  Affecting Works are valuable and influential because of their uniqueness and the specialness associated with them. In short, Affecting Works are characteristically treated in a way that is notably different from comparable objects that cost the same or are more expensive to make.

  Simply because the Affecting Presence is a presence, it is cared for--loved, respected, feared, held in awe, judged in terms of goodness or badness, fed and clothed. As a result, the factor of special treatment indeed becomes a key one. People can easily tell you if a given artistic expression or event is special and whether it deserves the kind of treatment worthy of emotional investment.

  An Affecting Work is special because it is treated in special ways: it is ritualized, it fosters deep play, and it is treated as something other than ordinary. Much of CEI's identity in the public mind is the related to the specialness of their products. Potency, to be sustained and magnified, requires that products and services be treated as special.

  When a work reaches the level of being an Affecting Presence, something unique happens to it. The work is no longer simply an object of interest. People begin to identify so strongly with the work that it actually is accorded the kind of deference ordinarily reserved for persons: it is given status, has a 'personality', and remarkably, is even treated as if it has 'rights.' An example of this phenomenon is the American flag and how it is treated much like a person with rights (it can't be violated), and is accorded special status with specific rites and ceremonies.

  The more CEI treats their products as special and unique, the more the public will also. The result is greater value being placed on the products. Subsequently, sales would increase. It remains an open question as to whether CEI has maximized the specialness and uniqueness of its products to increase sales and profits. But if profits are flat or in decline, it is usually because the specialness and uniqueness of its products have been compromised in some way.

  For example, when we consider the expansive merchandising of CEI's products, we begin to wonder what is special about these consumables, particularly since the merchandise is within easy reach of most people. Has CEI's merchandise lost its influence and potency because of its commonness? It appears there is a significant opportunity here to utilize CEI's existing pantheon of Affecting Presences in more unique and creative ways that would heighten the specialness of this merchandise and engage people in active play.

  When we see how upset the public becomes when it thinks the Company is not treating their products properly, we know they are talking about an Affecting Presence and an Affecting Work. If CEI views its products and services are mere consumables, it will continue to receive objections from the public, or the public will begin to express its disappointment with CEI's products and services. Anytime CEI receives negative feedback (either verbal or through loss of profits) about its products or services, the concept of specialness has most likely been compromised and it will behoove CEI to take this into consideration when searching for responses and solutions.

  Anytime an Affecting Work's specialness and uniqueness is compromised, it loses potency, loses its magic and becomes mundane. As a result, it is no longer powerful and influential. People will treat the former Affecting Presence no differently than any other common product that can be purchased anywhere. As people lose interest, market share is lost and revenues decline. It is a delicate balancing act, but it is possible that the Company is not leveraging their creativity and the mythology/deep play imbedded within their products well enough to maintain their specialness and actually increase profits.

  Self-supporting

  Affecting Works are so powerful in their performance and the public's experience that they actually become self-supporting, so that even when exhumed after centuries of burial, they still assert themselves in our presence. Think of the enduring and self-supporting nature of several of CEI's products. They have a life of their own because they embody the qualities of deep play, dense meaning, specialness, etc.

  Because of the properties of deep play, dense meaning and specialness, a powerful fascination takes over, and as we have pointed out previously, works at this level are affecting and treated as 'beings.' Can you imagine what would happen if the Company tried to drastically alter some of its products, or even do away with them all together? These products are so self-supporting that to significantly alter them would be disastrous. There would be a loud hue and cry from the public.

  Crosses cultures

  Affecting Works and Affecting Presences can be divorced from their native time and place because of their ultimate universal qualities. As a result, many Affecting Works can cross cultures but their meaning, experience and interpretation may shift from one people to another. Other countries may experience equal delight in experiencing CEI's Affecting Works, but those experiences and subsequent interpretations may be slightly different than American's. This is due to the particularities of a specific culture. Nevertheless, one of the key qualities of an Affecting Presence and work is that it is able to transcend cultures.

  Celebration and Delight

  When all is said and done, the end result of an Affecting Presence is the enduring experience of celebration and delight. The experience is a celebration because the unity of man is recognized and validated, and delights because of the experiences of dense meaning, deep play and magic. Ultimately, by interacting with Affecting Presences, individuals feel the world and themselves have been enriched.

  All of these elements create cultural artistic expressions and Affecting Presences, which are intimately tied to, connected to and expressed in Folklore. They are also profoundly linked to and involved in the creative process upon which CEI relies for the success of its products and services.

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