Dimonstrazione Dimonstrazione'd

I’m going back for a second to what Michael J. Gelb in his book, “How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci,” presents as Leonardo’s 2^nd Principle – Dimonstrazione – because I came across a terrific example of this principle operating in a person’s life – even if he doesn’t realize that he’s acting like Leonardo.

In an interview with Eater.com, Alton Brown talks about tools and how he approaches them.  He was explaining how he will be illustrating his newest cookbook (which will be #8 – don’t tell him it will be #11 or he will take you to task in no uncertain terms) using an iPhone.

<<Helen: I think you’ve brought a similar paradigm shift to the way that cooking and food information has been presented in books, too, though.  Your Good Eats books don’t feel like standard cookbooks.  They have a lot more going on.  They’re layered and they are multifaceted.  Was that another intentional choice?

Alton: Sure.  If I have an intentional choice with any form of media, especially where food is concerned, it’s to attempt to reinvent, or to break a rule.  Not because I’m trying to be an iconoclast, I’m not.

Helen: With a leather jacket here.

Alton: But what I am trying to do is to shake up forms, and find the dark little corners of any particular media form, and figure out a new way to approach it.  Books are the most frustrating of any of them because they just sit there.  They’re not temporal.  They don’t pass, you know, you can’t cover a cut with a music cue.  It sits there and stares at you, and you stare at it.  You’ve got to approach them differently.  My books have never been based on, “Okay, here’s a pretty picture of some food.  Now here’s the recipe for making the food.” I don’t do that because I don’t enjoy that.  I want even cookbooks to have a narrative.  I want to learn something, and I want to be taken someplace.  I want to be able to sit down and just read the book to read the book.  That’s how I kind of try to write books.  My new book is actually as conventional a cookbook as I guess I’m capable of.  It’s one hundred of my everyday cooking recipes.  But the book’s arranged by time of day instead of meal.  And every recipe gets a full-page photo that’s shot on an iPhone. So I guess even then, I can’t just do it like other people do.

Greg: Why the iPhone?

Alton: Because it is the visual tool of our age, as far as I’m concerned.  It’s funny, it forces you – every photo in my new book is taken from directly overhead.  I wanted to come up with a visual language that was more immediate.  I’m making a book for the Instagram crown, you know and so why not use that tool?  Why use fancy cameras and fancy lenses if I can use a tool, and find a new way to take advantage of that tool and do what it’s really good at, and stay away from the things that it isn’t very good at. Then a whole kind of new visual thing comes out of that and I like defining work sometimes by the tools.  Instead of deciding on a style and finding the tools for it, I’ll pick up a tool and say, “Okay, well, I’m intrigued by the tool.  Let’s style for it.” So the iPhone seems to be the perfect thing to do.  On top of the fact that nobody’s ever done it.  Another good reason, at least to try it.>>

There’s so much I love about his approach to what he does that’s expressed in this tiny snippet but for the Leonardo moment, “I like defining work sometimes by the tools.  Instead of deciding on a style and finding the tools for it, I’ll pick up a tool and say, ‘Okay, well, I’m intrigued by the tool.  Let’s style for it.’” (You can listen to or read the entire interview at the link to Eater.com above.)

Here’s the Leonardo exercise for our Leonardo/Alton moment: pick up a tool, any tool, and try to find as many things you can do with that tool as possible.  Re-invent it for uses it was never made for.  Need some help seeing what that might look like?  Try this.