- 16 Nov 2011
- 4 Comments
When I was a design student, my tutor told me a story that shocked me. He told me that he’d taken all the work he had ever created and destroyed it.
When you create something you put a piece of yourself into it. You transform your ideas into another object and it becomes a little extension of you. I thought his act of destruction was cold and callous.
Now that I manage designers and oversee projects, my view has changed.
I now know how easy it is to fall in love with your old work, or be afraid of changing something that seems to work. But if ideas are challenged, if you’re forced to think again, if you try solving the problem differently, then you consider the problem more deeply and your work improves.
To my tutor, destroying his work was an act of liberation, not destruction. By not being able to refer to any of his old work he became free to use the design skills that he’d built up over years in different and better ways.
So my challenge to myself, the team at cxpartners, and to you, is to trust that our next idea will be better than our last. Be fearless. Set aside what you’ve done on a project so far and look at the problem again.
Hi Richard,
it can be a really hard thing to do to look at something afresh.
Do you have any tips for how to clear your mind?
Is there an amount of time for a break and a cup of tea you’d recommend?
Or a technique for avoiding falling into familiar comfortable solutions aand thoughts?
Thanks
Niall
Hi Niall.
It can be tricky to keep a balanced perspective when you’re in the midst of a project.
A cup of tea can be a great answer. The common view is that you carry on working and thrashing something through until it’s finished. It’s much better to distract yourself for a while and come back with a fresh perspective.
I’m a big fan having the right documentation to give you perspective. So when you’re working on the execution of something, you’ve got documents that help you pull out and get a view of where what you’re working on fits into the bigger scheme of things.
In workshops the trick is to have a few techniques up your sleeve (as well as some good planning). I find it useful to actively think about zooming in and zooming out of a situation. So rather than having a linear view of where you need to get to have more of a 3D view. I make sure I build activities in that help get an overall sense of what is going on, and ones that focus on a problem in detail.
Finally, make sure you find people you trust and respect that disrupt your thinking and push you further than you feel comfortable. They may not give you the answer, but often sparks a line of thinking that you hadn’t explored before.
Hope that helps,
Richard
I too have had the to urge to toss out old designs, but they serve as a good measuring stick for the progression of ideas and ways of solving problems. Change is good.
Nice, concise article with a simple message.
I recently killed an old website that was (somewhat) profitable because it took up too much of my attention, causing me to get stuck in old thinking. I had to let it die in order to focus on solving things better, starting afresh.
Also, it helps to think of things as projects (that have an end, a lesson) instead of building blocks towards a single goal.
Leave a comment