艾德·卡特姆 《创新公司》 学会观察

第十章，保持开放的心态

6、LEARNING TO SEE 学会观察

In the year after Toy Story’s release, we introduced a ten-week program to teach every new hire how to use our proprietary software. We called this program Pixar University, and I hired a first-rate technical trainer to run it. At that point, the moniker university was a little misleading, though, as this was more of a training seminar than anything resembling an institution of higher learning. It is easy to justify a training program, but I had another agenda, and in trying to accomplish it, we would find surprising bonuses.

《玩具总动员》上映的那一年，我们引入了一项为期10周的培训，向新入职的员工传授皮克斯专属软件的使用方法。我们把这个课程命名为“皮克斯大学”，我还专门请了一位一流的技术培训师来负责。当时，“大学”这个名号其实并不准确，因为我们的培训只能算是一种课程，与高等教育的组织机构完全不沾边。设置一门培训课程的理由自然很充分，但我的心里其实另有打算，在达成这个目标的过程中，我们还收获了意想不到的珍宝。

While some people at Pixar already knew how to draw—and beautifully—the majority of our employees were not artists. But there was an important principle that underlies the process of learning to draw and we wanted everyone to understand it. So I hired Elyse Klaidman, who had taught drawing workshops inspired by the 1979 book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards, to come in and teach us how to heighten our powers of observation. In those days, you’d often hear about the concepts of left- and right-brained thinking, later called L-mode and R-mode. The L-mode was verbal/analytic, R-mode was visual/perceptual. Elyse taught us that while many activities used both L-mode and R-mode, drawing required shutting the L-mode off. This amounted to learning to suppress that part of your brain that jumps to conclusions, seeing an image as only an image and not as an object.

皮克斯的一些工作人员已经掌握了精湛的绘画技艺，但大多数的员工并非艺术家出身。学习绘画的过程中贯穿着一条基本的法则，我们希望能将这个法则介绍给大家。因此，我特地请伊丽丝·克莱德曼来到皮克斯，教我们如何提高观察力。伊丽丝受到贝蒂·爱德华兹1979年的《用右脑绘画》一书启发，利用书中的理论开设了一门绘画课程。当时，用左脑或用右脑思考的概念很是流行，之后演变为大家口中的“左脑模式”和“右脑模式”。左脑模式偏重于语言和分析，而右脑模式则偏重于视觉和感观。伊丽丝告诉我们，虽然许多活动需要将左右脑模式同时调动起来，但绘画却需要将左脑模式暂时关闭掉。因此，我们就必须学会将大脑爱贸然下结论的部分压制住，将眼前的图像单纯看作图像，而非物体。

Think about what happens when we try to draw a face. Most of us sketch out the nose, eyes, forehead, ears, and mouth but—unless we’ve learned to draw formally—they’re terribly out of proportion. They don’t resemble anybody in particular. That’s because, to the brain, all parts of the face are not created equal. For example, since the eyes and mouth—the loci of communication—are more important to us than foreheads, more emphasis is put on recognizing them, and when we draw them, we tend to draw them too large, while the forehead is drawn too small. We don’t draw a face as it is; rather, we draw it as our models say it is.

让我们来思考一下我们在尝试描画一张面孔时的情形。绝大多数的人会将鼻子、眼睛、额头、耳朵以及嘴巴逐一画出，但是，如果我们并没有接受过正规的相关训练，这些器官往往会出现严重的比例失衡，一点儿也看不出是谁的面孔。这是因为对于大脑而言，面部的器官并不是同等重要的。具体来说，眼镜和嘴巴这些交流的主要器官对我们而言要比额头重要，因此大脑会着重辨识这些器官。在作画时，我们也会倾向于将这些器官画得过大，而将额头画得过小。我们所画的并不是真实的脸庞，而是我们的思维模式对脸产生的印象。

The models of three-dimensional objects that we carry in our heads have to be general; they must represent all variations of the given objects. Our mental model of a shoe, for example, must encompass everything from a stiletto heel to a steel-toed boot; it can’t be so specific that it excludes those extremes. Our brain’s ability to generalize is an essential tool, but some people are able to move from the general to the specific to see more clearly. To stay with our drawing example, some people draw better than others. What are they doing that most of us aren’t? And if the answer is that they are setting aside their preconceptions, can we all learn to do that? In most cases, the answer is yes.

我们的大脑对三维物体的认识必须有整体性，要将物体的各种不同形式都包括在内。举例子来说，我们对鞋子的印象，必须将细高跟鞋到铁头长靴统统包含在内，而不能太过狭隘，将一些比较不常见的例子排除在外。我们大脑的综合能力是一项不可或缺的技能，而有些人却能通过在综合与具体之间切换获得更加清晰的视角。我们还以绘画来举例，一些人的绘画技巧要高过其他人，那么，这些人与常人相比有何秘籍呢？如果说他们的秘籍就是将偏见压制住，那么我们是否也能够效仿呢？

在大多数情况下，答案是肯定的。

Art teachers use a few different tricks to train new artists. They place an object upside down, for example, so that each student can look at it as a pure shape and not as a familiar, recognizable thing (a shoe, say). The brain does not distort this upside-down object because it doesn’t automatically impose its model of a shoe upon it. Another trick is to ask students to focus on negative spaces—the areas of space around an object that are not the object itself. For instance, in drawing a chair, the new artist might draw it poorly, because she knows what a chair is supposed to look like (and that chair in her head—her mental model—keeps her from reproducing precisely what she sees in front of her). However, if she is asked to draw what is not the chair—the spaces between the chair legs, for example—then the proportions are easier to get right, and the chair itself will look more realistic. The reason is that while the brain recognizes a chair as a chair, it assigns no meaning to the shape of the spaces between the chair’s legs (and, thus, doesn’t try to “correct” it to make it match the artist’s mental model).

艺术老师在培训新学生时有一些特别的技巧。比如说，他们会将物体倒置过来，好让学生单纯地去观察物体的形状，而不是将其看成一个熟悉而易于辨识的物件（比如一只鞋）。大脑无法扭曲这个倒置的物体，因为大脑没办法自动将对“鞋子”的既成观念套用在这物体上。另一个诀窍就是让学生们将注意力放在负空间上，所谓负空间，即物体周边除物体本身之外的所有空间。我们具体来看，在画一把椅子的时候，一位没有经验的绘画者可能会画走形，因为她对椅子的样貌很熟悉（作画者脑中对椅子的印象会造成干扰，让她无法将眼前的物体写实地记录下来）。然而，如果你要求作画者将除椅子之外的空间画出来（比如说椅腿之间的空间），这时，空间比例就会掌握得更好一些，椅子本身看上去也更真实一些。原因在于，虽然大脑会将椅子当作椅子来看，但对椅腿之间的空间却没有赋予任何意义（因此，也就不会将这空间按照作画者的思维模式予以“纠正”了）。

The lesson is intended to help students to see shapes as they are—to ignore that part of the brain that wants to turn what is seen into a general notion: a model of the chair. A trained artist who sees a chair, then, is able to capture what the eye perceives (shape, color) before their “recognizer” function tells them what it is supposed to be.

这样的教学意在帮助学生们真实地捕捉物体的形状，让他们将想要给看到的物体下概括定义的大脑活动抑制住，也就是不让学生们将既有的印象强加在椅子上。一位经过训练的艺术家在看到一把椅子时，可以在受到大脑的“识别”功能引导之前，将视觉采集的信息（形状和颜色等）真实地捕捉下来。

The same thing is true with color. When we look at a body of water, our brains think—and thus see—blue. If we’re asked to paint a picture of a lake, we pick the color blue, and then we’re surprised that it doesn’t look right on the canvas. But if we look at different points in that same lake through a pinhole (thus divorcing it from the overall idea of “lake”), we see what is actually there: green and yellow and black and flashes of white. We don’t let the brain fill in. Instead, we see the color as it really is.

我们对颜色的观感也一样。当我们看到大片水体时，大脑会想到蓝色，从而让我们“看到”蓝色。如果有人让我们画一幅湖景，我们便会选择用蓝色诠释，然后我们就会发现画在画布上的效果却有些别扭。如果我们透过一个小针孔来观察同一汪湖水中不同的点（这样，就不受所谓“湖水整体概念”的影响了），我们就能看到湖水的真面目其实是绿中带黄、黑中泛白的。这样一来，我们的大脑就不能为我们填补信息，我们就可以真实地捕捉眼前的颜色了。

I want to add an important side note: that artists have learned to employ these ways of seeing does not mean they don’t also see what we see. They do. They just see more because they’ve learned how to turn off their minds’ tendency to jump to conclusions. They’ve added some observational skills to their toolboxes. (This is why it is so frustrating that funding for arts programs in schools has been decimated. And those cuts stem from a fundamental misconception that art classes are about learning to draw. In fact, they are about learning to see.)

在这里，我想给大家补充一个重点：画家们虽然掌握了上文中的观察法，但这并不表示他们看不到我们眼中的东西。他们看到的东西和我们是一样的，但他们可以将过早下结论的模式关闭，因此要比我们看得更真切。也就是说，他们在自己的“视觉工具箱”中添置了一些观察上的技巧。（正因如此，学校用于美术课程的资金被大幅削减才令人如此痛心疾首。缩减这方面的资金投入，根源在于人们误认为美术课程就是教人如何画画的。而实际上，美术课程要教学生的应该是如何观察。）

Whether or not you ever pick up a sketchpad or dream of being an animator, I hope you understand how it is possible, with practice, to teach your brain to observe something clearly without letting your preconceptions kick in. It is a fact of life, though a confounding one, that focusing on something can make it more difficult to see. The goal is to learn to suspend, if only temporarily, the habits and impulses that obscure your vision.

无论你有没有碰过素描本，也不管你有没有当动画师的梦想，通过训练，我们都可以教会大脑在不强加既有观念的前提下清楚地观察事物。将目光聚焦在某个物体上时会更加难以看清这个物体，这听起来稀奇，实际上却是人生的常理。我们的目标就是让大家学会暂停造成视觉盲点的习惯和倾向，即便只有短暂的一瞬，也能收到效果。

I did not introduce this topic to convince you that anyone can learn to draw. The real point is that you can learn to set aside preconceptions. It isn’t that you don’t have biases, more that there are ways of learning to ignore them while considering a problem. Drawing the “un-chair” can be a sort of metaphor for increasing perceptivity. Just as looking at what is not the chair helps bring it into relief, pulling focus away from a particular problem (and, instead, looking at the environment around it) can lead to better solutions. When we give notes on Pixar movies and isolate a scene, say, that isn’t working, we have learned that fixing that scene usually requires making changes somewhere else in the film, and that is where our attention should go. Our filmmakers have become skilled at not getting caught up in a problem but instead looking elsewhere in the story for solutions. Likewise at Disney, the conflict between production and the oversight group could have been addressed by insisting that everyone behave better, when in fact, the real solution came from questioning the premise on which the oversight group was formed. It was the setup—the preconceptions that preceded the problem—that needed to be faced.

我为大家介绍这个话题，并不是想说服大家学会绘画，而是想告诉大家，人人都可以避免受到偏见的干扰。这并不是说我们不会产生偏见，只是说在考虑问题的时候，我们可以通过一些方式来屏蔽掉偏见的干扰。比如说，通过画“椅子的负空间”，我们就可以提高自己的观察力。只要把目光聚集在椅子之外的空间上，就能使椅子显得更加突出；不要死盯着问题本身不放（而是把注意力转向问题之外的大环境），就可以帮我们收获更好的解决方法。具体来说，在皮克斯，我们会把有问题的某一个场景隔离出来单独评价，但我们渐渐发现，想要修改这幕戏，我们通常还需要在影片的其他部分做些改动。因此，我们就必须把注意力放在出问题的场景之外。经过积累，我们的制作人员已经学会不在问题本身上纠结，而是从片子的其他部分寻找解决办法。依此类推，在面对迪士尼制作团队与监督小组之间的矛盾时，我们可以通过规范双方行为加以缓解，但实际上，想要根除矛盾，我们就要质疑监督小组存在的根基。事前的规划，也就是导致问题出现的错误理念，才是真正需要消除的。