“Embrace constraints”, “practice restraint”, “adopt the beginner’s mind”, “check your ego at the door”, “focus on the experience of the design”, “become a master storyteller”, “think communication not decoration”, “obsess about ideas not tools”, “clarify your intention”, “sharpen your vision & curiosity and learn from the lessons around you” and, finally, “learn all the rules and know when and why to break them”: those should all be part of our mindset when working in the actual business world.
Reading the “10 Tips on how to think like a designer” reminded me the times when I contributed to the design of many products and to their winning Design Awards all around Europe.
My approach was always on the maximum respect to design experience (it’s a mindset, developed through application on diversified markets and products) and my expertise was mainly in my ability to storytelling and communication.
But the start was always in
- clarifying the overall intention, which was mainly the service we wished to supply to people, being it a brand new one or a evolved one from a traditional approach;
- be very serious on finding ideas beneath tools, becoming a creator and not a technician;
- and curiously searching the market for any inspiration, which could be trans-functional or trans-national, always looking at things with the simple sight of a child, leaving aside the formal aspects and concentrating on substance.
Note: taking into account that I’m more a marketer than a designer, my most important function in the designing group was to keep it strictly connected with the market’s reality, avoiding that creativity could start prevailing by itself, ending the process in a concept product / service with very much immediate ROI.
But the most difficult part of the job was to “embrace constraints”, “practice restraint”.
Being the first phase a mixture between research and brainstorming, the difficulty were in keeping the creation of the idea within limits of the ambient where it was conceived. Creativity is richness, finding an idea is always powerful, but those two media frequently are “against” reality, which needs them but within the limits of economics.
Once a very good friend of mine told me that “an idea is not such if it’s not transformed into something real”.
A clear imagine of what the market asks for, of what we’re able to do, of the time involved into the process, of the involved resources is the basis of any designing process and the greatest enemy to creativity, at least of free creativity. But we live in a well constituted world, where rules are set and cannot be changed either without a great investment (in money or time) or with a very good idea.
So, reality is sometimes a limit but sometimes it’s a boundary that creativity is able to surpass.
When the latest case occurs, then “breaking the rules” is really fun.
