CULTURE BIS (english) — What painting has taught me about your future
A “Culture Bis” written for my students, for those who are not my students, and for all those who want to read of course.
Disclaimer: There are one or two references that will be obscure to you as it refers to course contents :), sorry!
Tomorrow and the next few days are going to be a bit scary for you because you’re going to receive your first high school results, discover the first stones of a path that will continue to take shape: it’s not only a job that you’re going to see on the horizon, it’s the outline of the life you’re going to have to lead. You are at the dawn of the end of choices, the beginning of “the rest of your life”.
… If you think like that, you will feel the anxiety of departure grow and paralyze you.
Life isn’t just about what school you go to or what job you do.
And I’ve barely begun my remarks when I have an aside to make, and it’s a big one. I have to apologize for one thing, as a representative of the educational institution: we have failed to prepare you for a profession. If the purpose of school is to allow you to choose a trade, then yes I’m sure I / we have failed. Why?
To the students who were in your shoes before the industrial revolution, when people still rode horses, the teachers should have advised them to become automobile engineers, but you can imagine that didn’t happen. Well, it’s the same for you, in another context, in another time. There is no curriculum that directly prepares you for the jobs you will be doing in 10 years.
Some of you are therefore preparing for a job that will have disappeared by then and others will be working in a job that does not yet exist. So, you might say, we can have a few ideas of trades that don’t exist yet and bet on one of these trades and hope that we’ll bet on the right horse.
Should we bet on a career as a virtual habitat designer? as an architect in the metaverse? as a data analyst of connected objects? as a space tourist guide? as an asteroid miner, as a brain content manager, as an organ designer, as a technology ethics advisor, as a drone manager, as a personal data protection advisor, as an end-of-life coach, as a renewable energy innovator, as a renaturalization strategist? Should you bet on a career as an ethical hacker? A digital detox therapist? Anyway, even if you bet on the right one, there are no ready-made curricula that prepare you for these jobs.
So the real question for me is: how do you prepare for a job that doesn’t exist yet? The question for you is: how do you prepare for a job that doesn’t exist yet?
And here’s the thing: it’s not all the history dates you’ve memorized, the declensions you’ve tried to learn or the definition of the square of the hypotenuse that will give you the answer to this question. By the way, it’s time I told you something: my job is not what you think it is. I am not a German teacher. Despite appearances, I have never tried to teach you German. Everyone knows it’s useless anyway.
Now that you know that in a certain sense I am a fraud, it’s time for me to tell you what I do for a living, and for that we have to take another detour:
Image a:
If you are not familiar with the Bauhaus and this iconic piece of furniture that is the Wassily Chair :
Image b:
Or wait, so we understand better at once:
The common point of these two images is quite easy to understand: two ideas which telescope.
In the second image: the continents and a foot, which creates something else than continents + a foot, the whole is much more than the sum of its parts. Here, what we “see” is the idea that we all come from the same starting point, and that by migrating to Asia, South America, North America, Australia, Europe, we have left the marks of our passage everywhere.
The Wassily chair is not the sum of a leather armchair and a bicycle, it is not even the sum of the comfortable character of leather and the foldable character of steel, it is much more than the sum of its parts: it is the embodiment of the meeting between the past and the future, it illustrates at the same time that it initiates a change of paradigm in the era of design and in the way of conceiving the objects which surround us.
So what matters is not the chair or the bicycle, but the encounter that is provoked between the two. To be a designer is to be creative, and it is to implement a type of thinking that has been ingrained in us for thousands of years, if I may say so, and I have the proof: hybrid thinking.
When we say hybrid, we think of the hybrid engine. And in the end we are not wrong because a hybrid engine is an engine that feeds itself, whose parts recharge each other by bringing together a classic engine and an electric battery.
And creative thinking, hybrid thinking, the kind that will get you out of many deadlocks and give you keys capable of opening doors that do not yet exist, is this thinking that makes worlds that were not meant to meet meet.
So maybe in our equation, the bicycle is something you heard one day in German class, I don’t know, a word, a concept, or just the idea that there are cultures, histories and ideas different from ours, and this thing that you heard, that sticks in your mind, and that is not necessarily “useful” to you as such, one day it may be that this thing meets another thing, and that the result is suddenly much more than the sum of its parts.
So no, I’m not a German teacher, it’s not German I’m teaching you, but it’s something different, or it’s the difference, or a difference, that one day will combine with something else and take on a new meaning.
Or not. But in the end, how many “useless” thoughts are needed for a “useful” idea to appear? How many times do you try different combinations before you find the right one?
German is not a goal, it is a piece of tool. To put it more graphically, German is as useful as a grain of sand to a myopic person. (And now you say “whaaao” what a great utility!) But I answer you that to this grain of sand, you add another grain of sand, then another grain of sand, then sodium carbonate and calcium oxide, you melt the whole, you give to this mixture a circular shape while it cools, a thickness, a curvature, you repeat the operation, you add a frame, two branches and you obtain glasses!
Anyway, all this to tell you that, ok, I was provoking you a bit by telling you that I was not a German teacher, don’t go and alert the parents’ federation and the rectorat for so little. What I am teaching you is not declensions, but the awareness of the existence of something else (a country, a language, a history, a culture), it is an opening that, by learning to consider as such, you may one day be able to take advantage of on your own path, because that is what it is all about.
That’s what we started with, and that’s what we have to come back to.
Imagine the beginning of your existence as a blank canvas, which you start by covering spontaneously and naturally with the naive colors of childhood, they blend well together, it’s fluid, and then you move on, you add one by one the details of the painting, with the help of darker strokes, thousands of details, and while the colors on the palette are in reduced number you end up with hundreds of different colors on the canvas.
The one who best combines these colors on the palette, goes to the best schools, and will have the best future, right? And you, you find yourself in front of your canvas, at a stage where you are stuck, you feel that it doesn’t look like anything, or that you did wrong to start painting this tree at this place of the landscape.
At that point the best thing to do is to refocus on the colors you like on the palette, to ask yourself what patterns you like to draw, to ask yourself again what makes you tick when you paint. These are beautiful questions, and it sounds like a bit of a cliché, the romantic idea that you should follow your instincts and that what you love can be your compass in life. And yes it is a bit of a cliché because it’s not necessarily enough, especially in the social or work world. It is often necessary to ask yourself if the colors you like meet somewhere the colors of which the world is composed or will be composed.
But it is already a good start to know what you like. For example, I am over 30 years old and I know that I like blue, grey, green, I don’t even know. And I’m only talking about colors here, it’s supposed to be the easiest. So if I tell you to know what you like, at your age, and on top of that to know what the world will want, and where you can make it all meet, then you’re going to tell me we’re not out of the woods yet and you’d be right. You are not out of the woods, that’s for sure, that’s a fact. But we can try to locate the door of the inn, already.
This graph shows the evolution of the trades between the years 1980 and 2012. We can see that some of the occupations in the graph have already begun to disappear, while others have managed to maintain themselves. We can also see that the occupations that are developing over this period are occupations that combine mathematical skills with human relations or social skills. That the professions that will play a key role in the future are professions that combine these two a priori completely different fields.
A student entering university now, by the time he or she graduates, 5 million jobs will have disappeared. There will be even more talk of robots, nanotechnologies and AI than there is now. And when we have to ask ourselves what job we want to do, in the decades to come, we will have to ask ourselves “what job is not likely to be done by a robot”.
By the way, if you are interested, there is a page that allows you to know how many chances the job you are aiming at has to be one day totally taken over by robots: https://willrobotstakemyjob.com/
The robots, what they know how to do, is what we call “hard skills”, as opposed to what we call “soft skills”: the qualities of communication, listening, the ability to motivate oneself and to motivate, the sense of responsibility, the ability to inspire, to stay positive, to work together and to be flexible. And so, I was telling you at the beginning when I said we failed: all of those things, that’s not what seems to be the majority of your learning here and yet it’s the most important.
Ultimately, when you get out of school, at best you’ll be a Carsten (ref to the German Netflix series The Billion Dollar Code >more info here for the curious), trying to make art in a world where people don’t understand art, or you’ll be a Juri, trying to innovate in a world that doesn’t want innovation. Again, in this particular story, the solution lies in the meeting of art and technology, in the meeting of Carsten and Juri, and in the patience they have together in the face of events, in their ability to motivate each other, in their ability to trust each other’s vision and to combine their own vision with it. All the other obstacles on their way are only material obstacles, and that is always solved somehow when you have the idea and especially the motivation and the capacity to work to put this idea into practice.
And in spite of all this, they make a bad choice, an error of strategy that leads them to lose their invention, and we can always ask ourselves what would have happened “if”.
Sometimes you make choices that you feel have definitely ruined the canvas, but when you step back and take a good look at the whole picture, then you can realize that this picture is not the sum of its parts: it is much more than that.
No matter what craft you choose, no matter what motif you choose to paint, what matters is these little strokes that you will add to each other to embellish your painting and to give it a unique dimension. A bit of blue here, a bit of green there, a bit of math here, a bit of German there, a bit of sport there… Let’s work on the transitions between these different colors, a gradient here, a binder there. A bad line here, a clumsy line there, whatever. And instead of thinking ahead that you’ve messed up the beautiful colors you started with, you should instead ask yourself what touch to add to restore the overall balance. That’s what I’ve learned from painting, and that’s what makes painting difficult because you feel like giving up or throwing the canvas in the trash a thousand times, but you learn with practice that no matter what choice you’ve made, you always have the opportunity to make it better.
In short, all this to say that the important thing is to be patient and to try to see how to embellish each touch of paint on the canvas, knowing that each of these touches of paint is important, but that in the end none of these touches of paint is important; it is the canvas as a whole that will be important, and this canvas is not reducible to the sum of the parts that compose it, it is much more than that.
