The case for tangents
On the benefits of broad interests as invaluable to the design process.
Imagine you’re making a journey through challenging and perilous territory. To help get you to El Dorado you can either choose a guide who has taken only one route, or you can choose a guide who has taken many routes through the surrounding countryside, travelled widely beyond the region, knows a bit about the local flora and fauna, has read up on the history of the area (natural and otherwise) and is a good storyteller to boot.
It’s possible you could get to your destination with either. But, in addition to making your arrival more probable, the trip with the second guide would also be more likely to be enriching in less quantifiable ways.
I believe a similar principle holds true when looking for a solution to your design problems. Whether you’ve got a branding problem, a promotional need or an interface to be tackled, having a designer with a broad range of experiences and influences will bring greater richness to the range of possible solutions.
Further, for my part, I think reading broadly diverse articles, books and other resources is exceedingly valuable for a creative professional. Think of it as a kind of Butterfly Effect for design; a book’s pages flip over here and a concept is formed in another time as a result.
There are a multitude of different models for the “creative process” and “design thinking,” but the best ones, in my opinion, include the notion of allowing thoughts in from the outside – tangents if you will. Providing more grist for the mill, as any miller will tell you, leads to greater efficiency and, ultimately, greater output. And, the wicked-er the problem gets, having a wide ranging view allows for more fluidity when doing the necessary reframing. It’s apparent that the big payoff is realized in divergent thinking. Call it incubation, gestation, cross-pollination or whatever, but sometimes you have to look outside of the box to think, well… you know.
In the case of my personal experience being a creative professional, having worked on a broad variety of media types and design problems has allowed me to apply learnings from one arena to another’s challenges. Identity experience helps with interactive icon development, television commercial art direction helps with motion graphics and animations, direct marketing helps with web site design, and on and on. Similarly, reading avidly and with curiosity about diverse subjects opens the door to new avenues for consideration. For example, Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” has influenced interface projects I’ve worked on and I’ve drawn inspiration for many projects from the pages of the New York Times Magazine section.
Clearly focus and awareness of current trends and design industry references is required, but it’s all too easy for that to lead to a kind of tunnel vision in approach and execution. Keeping your peripheral vision open for opportunities and influences beyond the latest trend is at least as important as being current; it opens the door for the surprising and unexpected.
So, back to our journey, solving for the problem of getting to the golden city: though there’s a case to be made for treading a well-worn path sometimes, I know which guide I’d prefer. Besides, discussing the local flora would add value to the experience too.
Please get in touch if you’d like to have a chat, or, let me know if you’d like to tell me about some sources you find inspiring (here are a few of mine).
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