Alan Kay suggests that good inventors are like Michelangelo, both imagining the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—and also spending years on their back painting it! Part visionary, part obsessive craftsperson.
I wonder about auteurs in film—hundreds of staff doing detail work!
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Maybe one principle is that it’s possible to (partially) delegate to someone else who is themselves Michelangelo-like in that way.
Like: maybe Wes Anderson’s set dressers are just as visionary and obsessive as he is, so he can let them do some of the “painting”?
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Likewise in games: maybe an auteur-like direct can “outsource” only to a level designer who will themselves bring auteur-like sensibilities—and not to a “technician”? suggests experiences along these lines in his comments about The Witness’s team.
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I wonder if the important element is not so much whether he painted it single-handedly as much as that he was up there, on his back, “with candle wax dripping into his eye” for four years alongside maybe-assistants. That’s not delegation!
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Replying to @andy_matuschak
As far as I know, Michelangelo, Leonardo and Rafael all had apprentices that also spent time on their backs actually painting - Sistine Chapel painted by more than one brush.
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My ambient impression from watching is that art studios like ILM or Weta Workshops are good cases to look into for how this works today.
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And wrt delegation - how would you see Nolan, Jackson and others? There’s substantial invention going on at all levels of execution in their productions. Is that them, or does that count as delegation?
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I don’t know! That’s really what I’d like to learn about.
More concretely: I think they’re clearly doing amazing work. The scale is such that it’s only possible with large numbers of staff. So Kay’s claims are limited in some sense… what is that sense?
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I think the limit is in the line between vision and invention. Inventing is grappling, who’s on the patent, can be done in a team. Vision is coaching the grappling team, _requires_ a team to be fulfilled, person who funds the research that produces tbe patent.
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