ART, some are naturally drawn into it, others have been introduced to it and some others have learnt to shake the Art World through passion, skills and persevrance!
In this first blog of our “4 Must-Have Skills to Boost your Artistic Career” series, we are going to introduce you to Design Thinking, a process that will enable you to walk your way into crafting an impactful artistic career.
Nowadays, the trendiest management concepts are about building mission-driven businesses, social entreprises that not only create positive changes within our communities but also contribute in solving social problems.
Haven’t this been artists’ job since forever?
Artists have always been producing human-centered projects in order to deliver powerful messages to people, spread awareness among their societies, redefine social norms or simply offer a happiness therapy to help people deal with life’s challenges.
But since the business world have always been about 100% for-profit initiatives, artists could rarely fit into it and build financially sustainable activities around their art.
And if we take a look at our current art and business world with an optimism-filtered loop, we will be able to spot many practices that can be beneficial for both industries.
Design Thinking is one of them effective processes embraced by innovative companies and entrepreneurs that are leading our nowadays tech-world! And if your wish is to build a useful & impactful career around one of the Hip Hop elements or any other art form then we recommend you to follow Design Thinking’s 5 stages.
According to The Interaction Design Foundation, “Design Thinking process is iterative, flexible and focused on collaboration between designers and users” in an art context, between artists and their audiences, “with an emphasis on bringing ideas to life based on how real users think, feel and behave.”
Design Thinking’s five stage are:
And artists who want to start but don’t know where to start are invited to follow them and let me answer the question that will probably come to your mind How can we relate as an art community to these five-stage process?
In fact, in order to coceive an impactful art project or a sustainable art business around a specific theme then maximise its chances of success among an audience, one should start by understanding the targeted community, its needs as well as its encountered challenges through observation. This falls into Design Thinking’s 1 stage that is: Empathising.
During the next phase which is: Defining, artists are invited to define the problem they would like to tackle through their craft.
Referring to Breakreate as a case study, which is an online and offline platform that aims to spread Hip Hop culture among tunisian communities, its team has defined the following problem to be solved before coming up with the platform idea: Hip Hop artists in Tunisia need a platform that will speak up for them due to their poor media representation. Breakreate’s main purpose wasn’t then about making a profitable media business, it was about resolving an issue related to a poor media content starring Tunisian Hip Hop artists.
Then comes ideation, Design Thinking’s third stage. As stated on the Ineraction Design Foundation website, during the first two stages, artists have grown to understand their audience and their needs in the Empathise stage, and they’ve analysed and synthesised their observations in the Define stage, and ended up with a human-centered problem statement such as: Hip Hop artists in Tunisia need a platform that will speak up for them due to their poor media presentation.
Thinking outside the Box is then the next step: artists, individually or through collaborations, can now proceed with generating ideas to solve their defined problem, Building a platform dedicated to promoting the Tunisian Hip Hop community updates was the idea that Breakreate decided to take to the next two phases of Design Thinking that are Prototyping & Testing that led to building the Breakreate web platform, experimenting it, to be finally tested on its target that it is the Tunisian Hip Hop community.
As we are constanstly facing a fast-paced environment, Design Thinking is a must-have skill to learn for artists and art entrepreneurs to keep up with our society’s changes, needs and evolutions for an authentic art pieces and a revolutionary art projects.