Observed

What could ensure a more accurate portrayal of What Happened than having someone there?  Someone who was there and felt what it was like to be there.

That’s what I read when I learned this morning that the United States Marine Corps has an artist in its ranks, a painter deployed to capture combat scenes.  “We have somebody who was there who can tell the story,” according to Col. Robert Oltman, USMC, referring to Sgt. Kristopher J. Battles, the lone remaining Marine combat artist.

Why not photography?  I’ll let the New York Times answer that one. (more…)

Here’s an excerpt from a blog I recently started following.  It’s a post about Apple’s head industrial designer, Jonathan Ive, and the process he used for the iPhone 4:

“It’s very hard to learn about materials academically, by reading about them or watching videos about them; the only way you truly understand a material is by making things with it,” Ive explains, going on to add that years upon years of making his own models with his own hands is what gave him a deep understanding of the materials he’s worked. “And it’s important to develop that appetite to want to make something, to be inquisitive about the material world, to want to truly understand a material on that level.”

I couldn’t help but think of the Roycrofters.  These American arts-and-crafters espoused the same kind of creative process over a century ago.  The furniture, books and other everyday objects they designed, built and fabricated expressed the exact nature of the materials used.

Ive, Apple and the Roycrofters understood.  They found the true nature of the materials in their products.  They knew that for the user to be the most pleased required total honesty and that this required gemba.