Transformation Transforming Transformed

Jumping through a lot of hoops to dangle at the moment of

May 22, 2025

Currently challenging myself to write about the push-and-pull of creativity and entrepreneurship; art vs capitalism; artistry vs product for 30 days.

If this is something you’re thinking about, then I want to hear from you!!

close photo of woman's back — Photo by Romina Farías on Unsplash

Yesterday, I wrote this in my actual notebook based on my last post:

Expression is a means of embodiment. That’s why there are so many different kinds, methods, formats, genres and mediums of expression! People are expressing their internal selves in all kinds of external ways. Thus, the journey from internal to external is a transformative unit of distance in and of itself. And that moment of interaction—where external expression meets other human—is equally so.

This makes me think back alllllll the waaaaaay to an article I read in Harper’s Weekly so many years ago that said every creative piece has a lineage you can trace.

OK? Ok.

Now, let’s juxtapose that with this from Joe Procopio in Built In:

The best way to describe AI in 2025 is still the simple definition I came up with in 2010. It’s If-This-Then-That (IFTTT), but really, really fast. It’s decision-making at hyperspeed. But it does not introduce human ingenuity, intuition or unlearned experience, like when we copy the actions of a mentor without totally understanding why we should. It just fakes those things. With math.

That’s what an algorithm does—figure out the next most likely step in the pattern. And when you have bajillion units of data/patterns to crunch across the internet, then you get some good output. (Perplexity AI tells me that approximately 402 million terabytes of data is created everyday.)

But creation isn’t like that. Creation is capable of making exponential, subtle, behavioral, minute, and squiggly leaps. From A to B, creativity can step or do a wheelie, depending on that transfiguration that happens between person ➡ piece ➡ person.

That’s again why I say language is the greatest and most nimble of human kind. It keeps changing, evolving, adapting, transforming from person to person, sentence to sentence, generation to generation, medium to medium, etc and etc.

OK? Ok.

In product land where I spend my Bruce Wayne life, innovation often gets confused for benchmarking. Here’s what my mentor Jaime Levy says about that:

When you benchmark competitors, you want to find competitive parity among products.[…] You’re looking for trends, standards, gaps, and overall sense of the look and feel of the landscape. Often, you will notice unintuitive design conventions being repeat. […] You might wonder why they’re all broken in the same way.

Benchmarking is a reactive form of design to my mind. It’s businesses looking to just keep pace rather than not only lap but compete in a completely different weight class than the competition. The landscape has settled into the expected. Therefore, the way to innovate is make a transformative leap!

OK! So now what?

That’s the symbiosis between the Batman v Bruce Wayne selves… I suppose. Ingenuity, intuition, the state of going from ignorant to aware …. these are not simple steps. These are mechanisms of transformation, and transformation is full-bodied—to appreciate it all, you need to have good body feel yourself of the event, the interaction, the moment, the ripple affect as it moves through you.

And that movement is something that is not just a launch, a feature, a function, a prompt, a service, a unit, a source of revenue, it is tied to the greater ecosystem of the world and life.

????????

Right? That’s where I’m going to end today. What do you think?