Design's silent killer (of ideas).
Ever wanted to succeed so badly you can't even make a start?
I'm sure this kind of performance anxiety is familiar to many of you. Becoming so consumed by the desire to achieve your best that you get bogged down in inaction. Trapped in fear of whatever you do next being less than the most optimal outcome. Maybe not just your best, maybe the best. Just to add a bit more pressure.
This is something I've been feeling intensely this week, in part because I've been aiming for the best. The self-inflicted pressure to best design (IMO) the world has ever seen had me stalling on the start line, and getting frustrated because of it.
To overcome the paralysis I have been reminding myself that the best designs only come about through careful iteration. They do not, as surprising as it may seem, spring fully and perfectly formed from a vacuum.
The best designs evolve over iterations of creating and testing ideas until the perfect design, or perhaps the one least full of compromises, rises to the surface. Not just on a micro scale either; like iterating from one concept to the next within the same project. It also happens on a macro scale. In some sense, this project is an iteration of the project before, is an iteration of the one before that. Your project, on this same macro level, might even be an iteration of someone else's work. That's right, your first iteration could quite validly be simply copying someone else's homework.
In a previous job we used to joke about getting the design right first time. Of course, nobody ever gets the design right first time. And in fact, the inverse is true. The more times you iterate, the more perfect your design becomes.
But to iterate, you still have to start with the first iteration.
In that same previous job, our design and development would be so frantic that we would rarely spend time doing early concept development. The kind of early and quick iterating that I'm a strong proponent of now basically never happened. Not that our designs sprung forth fully and perfectly formed. Rather, because we would 'jump straight to CAD', the iterating would simply happen on screen rather than on paper.
On more than one occasion I would liken my CAD design to a block of marble. Slowly, by chipping away at it, the design would form from the primitive shapes. With time and finesse the final design would emerge. Though sometimes the whole lot did need to be scrapped to start again. To be clear, going 'straight to CAD' isn't the best way to develop a design. Going straight to the computer, while seeming like the fastest way to get something done, is often a false economy. Certainly, CAD can give you much better visibility to size and proportion in your designs, but if you don't know what you're immediately trying to achieve, CAD is not the fastest or best way to figure it out. Not only is it slower to sketch out an idea in CAD, it's also more resistant if you want to change it. CAD will railroad you down the first idea you start modelling.
My point isn't that paper is better than CAD for ideation.
My point is that iteration happens whether you like it or not. More than that; iteration should be wholly embraced if you're aiming for the best possible design.
Worrying about getting your design perfect will leave you failing to start, like it did me, or closing your mind off to trying and learning as part of the development process. Rather than worrying about getting your design perfect, instead focus on getting your first, worst design done. Then learn and move on from it.
As I've said before, designing, prototyping, testing, and changing a design early in development is substantially cheaper than doing it later. The closer one gets to production, the exponentially more expensive changes become. Therefore doing the most and largest changes you can early, the cheaper and further progressed your design becomes. With little effort at all, iterating early and often could save you thousands, tens - or even hundreds - of thousands of dollars.
But to do that you have to start.
Rather than adding so much weight to the first step in what should be a long line of steps and half-steps, take all the weight off. Accept that it's going to be the worst idea (it usually is), and that the sooner you pass through it, the sooner you can get onto the next and future steps that will lead you to your optimal design.
Worst case, it'll show you what not to do. That's ok too.
