What has boredom and failure ever done for us?
This week I presented a webinar to the CICA Labs cohort on Industrial Design in medtech.
They're not bad, but I'll admit I've still got some work to do to improve my presos. Making them clearer and more concise while still being suitable for the intended group. It's hard to go right back to the very beginning of all that you know. As the song goes; I've forgotten more than you'll ever know. But the problem is of course that I've forgotten that I've forgotten, until someone asks me what a test jig is.
While most of the topic focused on prototyping, what kind of prototyping to do when, the part I really wanted to talk more about was ideation.
To me the act of ideation is fascinating, and very human.
Ideation is entirely decoupled from time and effort.
Charles Darwin walked more than two hours every day.
Albert Einstein slept 10 hours a night, started work late, and took long lunches.
Polymath Henri Poincaré worked in earnest only four hours a day.
Writer John McPhee would lie on a picnic table in his backyard.
These people have done some of most prolific and important work in modern history. Despite their relaxed approach to 'work'.
Ideation
I've written a bit about ideation before. It's the usual thing; pencil and paper, sketch everything out, no bad ideas. In that piece I also talk a bit about setting aside your ideas to let you subconscious process them.
Given that creativity is a very human thing, one thing I haven't really written about in any length is the human side of ideation.
We all want to come up with great ideas, and yet more and more we don't do the things that lead to true innovation. From the discussion this week on ideation and prototyping, there's really two things I wanted to explore:
An external environment for ideation; and
An internal environment for ideation.
A Space Filled With Noise
It's not news that our lives are both busier than the used to be, and more things are wrestling for our attention than any time in history. I'm not going to get on my soap box about either of those things, however they both heavily impact our process of ideation.
While it's easy to imagine that designers and artists come up with their brilliant ideas by sitting in the studio brute-forcing ideas onto paper for untold hours every day. And that's certainly true in extreme cases, but the larger truth is that meaningful insights are rarely conceived from commercially-pure time and effort.
From both scientific rigour and personal experience, our most valuable insights often come when we least expect them; in the shower, in bed, walking. When you're brain is in neutral.
This is because once we've loaded up our brains with all the pieces of the puzzle we're trying to solve, our subconscious takes over and will slowly fit them together for us. It might take a day or a week or a month, but the insights will come.
These quiet moments, either in boredom or mindless activity, are important times when our mind is left to wander. When the connections between seemingly unrelated elements are made.
However, if we're rushing from hither to thither, or reaching for our phone whenever there's a moment of emptiness, our mind is never given this opportunity. And the connections go by undiscovered.
As an aside; designers pride themselves on their amazing ideation skills. Brainstorming, whiteboards, post-it notes. It's all very creative-looking. And yet, while these activities are essential for loading up the puzzle pieces, they're often least well suited to solving the really curly problems. Despite it's inward value, it's hard to present the image of your designers going for walks in the park as delivering serious value for the client's money. Even if it is.
While a distraction-free environment can be key to ideation, sometimes what's better is an environment entirely free of stimulation.
Think about that for a moment. When was the last time you were truly bored? What does the idea of being without your phone, without noise, without stimulation feel like? My guess is the idea isn't a comfortable one. The anxiety climbs just thinking about it. That is the society we live in now, we've lost our tolerance to boredom.
If necessity is the mother of invention, boredom is surely it's father.
The Fear of Failing
Second to our fear of boredom is a our fear of failure.
As designers, as humans, we have our pride and we have our egos. When we ideate, even when we say there are no bad ideas, we avoid the ideas that might lead to failure.
To truly unlock innovation is sometimes to accept that we will fail, and embrace it.
We don't make mistakes, we have happy accidents.
-- Bob Ross
I feel within design, and particularly in an extremely competitive field like Industrial Design, that designers need to present themselves as having the answers. They're paid to pull the answer from their heads and impart that knowledge upon the client for a fee. And yet the reality is quite different.
Ideation is 99% failure.
Knowing how to fail gracefully, to fully capitalise on those happy accidents, is what can lead to innovation. I don't think I've ever seen a design studio brag about how good they are at failing.
Sure, it's nice to identify with the 1% success, but embracing the 99% failure is real design. However long and chaotic it is, that's the design process. Failure is integral to the process, but the process rarely fails.
Tying back into the prototyping, this is why we prototype early and often. Fail cheaply, quickly, and safely. Or as the tech industry puts it; fail fast.
Last week I wrote about embracing our punk philosophy in order to break away from the algorithmic sameness of AI and inoffensive blandness of corporate art. How, to embrace our humanness we should (where we can) break some rules and be free to express ourselves in our design.
But to do so means we may, even probably, fail. Yet to fail is to learn, and failure can open new doors you would have otherwise never, quite literally, imagined.
