10 tips on thinking like a designer
Found this on Presentation Zen and couldn’t resist reposting it. A few samples:
Embrace constraints. Constraints and limitations are wonderful allies and lead to enhanced creativity and ingenious solutions that without constrains never would have been discovered or created. In the words of T.S. Eliot, “Given total freedom the work is likely to sprawl.” There’s no point complaining about constraints such as time, money, tools, etc. Your problem is what it is. How can you solve it given the resources and time that you have?
Practice restraint. Any fool can be complicated and add more, it takes discipline of mind and strength of will to make the hard choices about what to include and what to exclude. The genius is often in what you omit or leave on the editing room floor.
Check your ego at the door. This is not about you, it’s about them (your audience, customer, patient, student, etc.). Look at the problem from their point of view — put yourself in their shoes. This is not easy, it takes great amounts of empathy. Get in touch with your empathetic side. Empathy — an under valued “soft skill,” can be a great differentiator and is key for truly understanding a problem.
Creativity and design
Andy Rutledge has a great article in issue 254 of A List Apart. He makes a clear distinction between useful creativity and unchecked self-expression.
Creativity has nothing at all to do with self-expression or flamboyancy. Aside from the simple ability to create things, the most important feature of creativity is a highly developed perception filter that is somewhat less common than we’re led to believe. [It’s] an inborn capacity for thinking differently than most, seeing differently, and making connections and perceiving relationships others miss.