An Illustrative Introduction to a Curious Compendium of Incomplete Lists for Productive Practice, 2026.

An Illustrative Introduction to a Curious Compendium of Incomplete Lists for Productive Practice offers readers a concise introduction to this series of discursive word lists for those interested in creativity, practice, design and more. While each word list is preceded by a short introduction, this overarching overview shares a few key ideas, insights, and inspirations that underpin the series as a whole. These lists were generally sourced from my creative course lecture notes. Links to all three word lists are provided below:

  1. An Incomplete List of C-Words for the Creative Course
  2. An Incomplete List of D-Words for Designerly Domains (In Progress)
  3. An Incomplete List of P-Words for Project-Based Pursuits (In Progress)

Introduction

These “incomplete lists” were at least partly inspired by a manifesto written by Bruce Mau in the late 1990s. Originally from Canada, Mau is a multidisciplinary designer, educator, and creative leader. Mau’s practice has served as a guiding light for this designer, and one can confidently assume the same for many of his generation. In 1998, while living in Toronto, Mau’s sister invited him to contribute an essay to a small magazine she had planned to produce. Mau seized the opportunity and penned a reflective manifesto as he pondered how he might “sustain a lifelong practice.”[1] Mau intuitively titled this discursive treatise “An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth.” Looking back on it, Mau once stated:[2]

I reflected on my own patterns of living and working, and asked myself: What is really valuable here? How might these patterns be helpful to others? Can we learn from the unusual studio culture that we have created? I realized that many of my contemporaries were taking responsibility for the information they produced but not for its impact. They were committed to the form but not the content. I understood that the task of designers is less to inform people than to move them. Our role is to inspire.

Mau then presented his manifesto at a design conference in Amsterdam, which led to Chee Pearlman inviting him to publish it in I.D. magazine.[3] Over the next 20 years, Mau and his countless collaborators have designed a wide range of projects not limited to books, brands, exhibitions, environments, and more.[4] Long before the present-day notion of “collabs,”[5] Mau and his team members, clients, and collaborators seemed to exemplify this creative-collaborative spirit. As chronicled in a namesake 2021 documentary film,[6] Mau has helped shape brands, institutions, museums, regional plans, and more. ¶ In a 2012 guest lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design—Mau reflected upon this multifaceted body of work—giving such varied work the informal label “context projects.”[7] By using context as a frame, Mau situates such work not by “what” was produced per se, but rather the multivariate factors that shaped and inform the work. Not surprisingly, both collaboration and context are but two of the c-words you will find in my Incomplete List of C-Words for the Creative Course.

Read This
A second, more abstract point of inspiration for these lists first struck me in the mid-2000s. Around this time, I had just started working within the marketing department of an architecture firm. Just as I started, the firm moved into a brand new self-designed open-plan studio in Boston’s Seaport. Upon arriving at the new open-plan space, as the architects and support staff unpacked, like all others, I received four items: a desk, a file cabinet, a computer, and an Aeron office chair (produced by Herman Miller). Attached to the Aeron chair was a small magenta booklet with crisp knockout serifed type on the front that read, “Read this while adjusting your Aeron chair.” ¶ By this time, the Aeron chair[8] had become a (somewhat corporate) symbol or artifact associated with those who worked in creative fields. Akin to opening a fortune cookie, I somehow expected the manual to offer some inspirational or philosophical content. In hindsight, this seems quite odd. ¶ In design history circles, Herman Miller has long been viewed as a pioneering, design-centric organization.[9] I must confess that I was at least somewhat disappointed to encounter a typical, step-by-step chair-adjustment instruction manual. ¶ Many years later, I asked myself: what was it (beyond instructions) that I was expecting to find within that chair-adjustment booklet? I began to imagine a creative treatise for the creative occupant of these chairs. I then also recalled the wonderfully independent, sometimes subversive zines[10] I had encountered while in art school. In the spirit of these zines, I wondered whether the Aeron chair manual could, like Rodin’s Thinker, encourage or symbolize introspection? ¶ My off-beat “instruction manual” ponderings ended quite quickly when a work order for a proposal arrived on my desk. I share this odd memory here because, in part, the lists that follow may well be or represent the contents of that never-produced zine-like chair manual.

Watch This
A more recent point of inspiration for these lists are the Tanner Lectures on Human Values. As a multi-university lecture series in the humanities, the Tanner Lectures on Human Values were first founded in 1978 by the American scholar and philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner.[11] Fortunately, many of these lectures can be found online and watched for free. The lecture that most directly inspired this series was delivered in 2024 by Rachel Barney, Professor of both Classics and Philosophy at the University of Toronto. Barney has been teaching at the university level for over 30 years. Her research has “ranged from the early sophists to the late Neoplatonic commentator Simplicius,” but primarily focuses on Plato.[12] Barney’s Tanner Lectures, delivered over three consecutive days at UC Berkeley, were titled “The Authority of Craft.”[13] ¶ Before hitting play on Barney’s lectures, I wondered how one might approach delivering anything cogent or substantive with a topic as broad and multifaceted as craft. But Barney’s approach to the lecture itself was quite masterful. At the outset of her talk, instead of diving headlong into scholarship, Barney began with a memorable story. The story takes place in New York City, where, as Barney recalls, her wealthy aunt stops to observe a skilled wallpaper hanger working in a hotel lobby. The aunt then asks the worker if they can watch as he papers the wall. In response to Barney’s aunt, the worker says, “Lady, does Joe DiMaggio mind if you watch?” This story immediately immerses the listener and, more importantly, frames the broad topic of craft in a memorable way. Then Barney proceeds to explore the wide humanistic qualities and tensions of craft through a multi-pronged mix of historical, divergent, and convergent approaches. In this way, like a hawk scoping its prey from high above, Barney triangulates the topic from multiple angles before diving in. At around the 17-minute mark, Barney states plainly that craft is an endlessly vast subject. As Barney states, “craft is a very big tent.”[14]

Ponder This
With Barney’s notion of “a very big tent” in mind, many of the Tanner lectures engage in and explore such wide “big-tent” ideas and issues.[15] As we ponder the incompleteness of our inquiries before the power of the all-knowing, the title of a 2009 paper by design educator Geoffry Fried also comes to mind. Fried’s paper, first delivered at the International Association of Societies of Design Research conference in 2009, was appropriately titled “Chasing Infinity: Defining the Purpose of Design.” As the title suggests, Fried pragmatically acknowledges the impossibly vast nature of his subject, thus making room for an exploration rather than a researchable question. Thus, like Fried, Barney, Mau, and others, the goal here is to encourage one, if possible, to explore some tents.[16] As Bruce Mau stated in the very first point of his manifesto, “You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it.”[17]

Footnotes

  1. “IMFG,” Bruce Mau Studio, https://brucemaustudio.com/projects/an-incomplete-manifesto-for-growth/.
  2. Ibid.
  3. Ibid.
  4. For more on Mau and his career, I suggest checking out the 2022 documentary Mau. See: Mau. Directed by Benjamin Bergmann and Jono Bergmann, featuring Bruce Mau, 2021.
  5. One of Bruce Mau’s many collaborations was the 1997 book S,M,L,XL. The 1376-page volume was the result of a multiple-year intense partnership between Mau and Rem Koolhaas (founder of the Dutch architectural firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture or “O.M.A”). See: Koolhaas, Rem, and Bruce Mau. S, M, L, XL. The Monacelli Press, 1997.
  6. Mau. Directed by Benji Bergmann and Jono Bergmann, Greenwich Entertainment, 2021.
  7. Mau, Bruce. “2012 Class Day Lecture,” YouTube. May 24, 2012, video, 33:00, https://youtu.be/K3Q5bjDOYoQ?list=PL309451B70B1DE1FF.
  8. The Aeron chair was designed by Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf, who began working on it in the late 1970s, only to have early iterations canceled. The Aeron went on to become one of the best-selling individual office chairs in the world.
  9. As an aside, I have always admired Stephen Frykholm’s well-known and nearly timeless picnic posters for Herman Miller. These lovely screen-printed picnic posters spanned twenty years and can be found in art museums around the world.
  10. “Zine” is shorthand for fanzine. Zines are often used to promote music, bands, and culture. Many zines use low-cost or rudimentary production techniques (photocopiers, typewriters, collage, pens, markers, glue, tape, etc.).
  11. “Tanner Lectures on Human Values.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2 August 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanner_Lectures_on_Human_Values.
  12. “Rachel Barney.” University of Toronto, 17 Oct 2025, https://philosophy.utoronto.ca/directory/rachel-barney/.
  13. “Rachel Barney | Tanner Lectures.” Berkeley Tanner Lectures, https://tannerlectures.berkeley.edu/rachel-barney/.
  14. Barney, Rachel. “Tanner Lectures on Human Values with Rachel Barney: Lecture I – The End of Craft.” YouTube, uploaded by UC Berkeley Events, 4 May 2024, https://youtu.be/chDcuJmqBjc.
  15. Another wonderful “big-tent” example among many is Rowan Williams’ 2014 Tanner lecture, “The Paradoxes of Empathy.” Williams is a Welsh Anglican bishop, theologian, and poet, who served as the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012. Part 1 of Williams’ lecture can be found here: https://youtu.be/fdeoU0aJLX8. Part 2 can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/mQF_y24rZjY.
  16. Along these lines, many excellent lectures can now be accessed online. For instance, I also discovered a masterful series of lectures on the history of philosophy by the late Dr. Arthur Holmes, which Wheaton College appears to have made public in 2015. See, for instance: Holmes, Arthur. “A History of Philosophy | 01 The Beginning of Greek Philosophy.” YouTube, uploaded by wheatoncollege, 2 April 2015, https://youtu.be/Yat0ZKduW18.
  17. “IMFG,” Bruce Mau Studio, https://brucemaustudio.com/projects/an-incomplete-manifesto-for-growth/.

FILED IN: Perspectives


IMAGES
An Illustrative Introduction to a Curious Compendium of Incomplete Lists for Productive Practice by Dan Vlahos - Cover