How do you know what’s true? I mean this in the most prosaic way you can imagine. As in, how do you know which conditions about the “real” world should inform your decisions? Your answer to this question will have a big impact on your life.
Imagine you’re walking in the dark and hit a wall. The pain you feel is a good sign that the wall is “true.” It’s unarguably there; you just ran into it. The bump proves it. There’s a baseline here: what your senses are reporting back to you. The pain is information. If you have any wits, you’ll avoid doing that again.
Not everything is as obviously true. Let’s take another example. Say you’re trying to manage your weight, so you step onto your bathroom scale. The number you read on the scale’s display, too, is information. By itself, it’s less obviously meaningful than the pain you feel from the wall. To begin with, it’s more abstract than the bump. To make sense of the number, you must know what it is and what it means. Is it higher or lower than “normal”? Well, that requires that you know what “normal” is. If this is the first time weighing yourself, you may not have anything to compare it to. So you may have data, but not necessarily information.
My friend Dave Gray has started something new; he calls it the School of the Possible. I describe it as a self-organizing framework for fostering and scaling emergent, long-term, value-generating group activities. Huh? Yeah, I know; not very concrete. Still, enticing — it hints at an opening for new ways to engage with others to add value to the world.
Intriguingly, it starts with re-discovering your purpose as an individual — what you’re here for. (After all, how can you add value if you’re unsure of what you’re here to do?) You manifest this purpose by setting up a “lab page” on Medium that clearly states your what you’re setting out to do, your progress so far, how you can help others, and how others can help you.
This is my lab page. The mere process of writing it has been useful; it’s helped me clarify ideas I’ve long had rattling around in my skull. I expect to continue to modify this page as these ideas evolve. Your feedback is welcome; please leave comments on the Medium page. And if you’d like to start a lab page of your own, this post explains the concept and basic structure.
You may have heard the story of the bride who cut off the ends of the roast. It’s an old legend with many variations. Snopes has a good one:
The new Jewish bride is making her first big dinner for her husband and tries her hand at her mother’s brisket recipe, cutting off the ends of the roast the way her mother always did. Hubby thinks the meat is delicious, but says, “Why do you cut off the ends — that’s the best part!” She answers, “That’s the way my mother always made it.”
The next week, they go to the old bubbie’s house, and she prepares the famous brisket recipe, again cutting off the ends. The young bride is sure she must be missing some vital information, so she askes her grandma why she cut off the ends. Grandma says, “Dahlink, that’s the only way it will fit in the pan!”
The point of this story is that sometimes we make life hard for ourselves by following traditions by rote. Often these traditions have a practical origin (e.g. grandma didn’t have a big enough pan) but over time have acquired a magical aura. “This is how we do it in this family,” or “this way the juices flow out of the ends,” or “this way the roast has more room.” Going through the motions without questioning the reasoning behind them can lead to unnecessary trouble.
When I hear people tell me something I’m planning to do is “hard”, I ask myself “Why is it hard?” And more to the point, I ask myself a question I love: “How would I go about this if I assumed it was easy, rather than hard?” I first heard a version of this question in Tim Ferriss’s podcast, and find it a good way of testing my assumptions about the “right” way to do things.
Often I find that the things we assume make the task “hard” can be easily accomplished with a new technology or a completely different approach. People just assume it’s hard because it’s been hard in the past, and they’re not questioning whether the conditions that made it hard are still true. Discovering an easier way to accomplish something hard is not only practical; it also gives me an energy boost. It satisfies my directive to take things by their smooth handle.
Me: Have you seen the work x is doing?
Colleague: Yeah, it’s interesting but too academic.
By “too academic,” I think my interlocutor means theoretical as opposed to practical. And I can see he or she means; some work is definitely more theoretical than practical.
This distinction between theory and practice in design is interesting to me. On the one hand, I understand the value of practice. Real-world experiences can generate very useful heuristics. These can then be taught to others, leading to a robust body of knowledge over time.
However, I also see value in a theoretical approach to design work. Where a practical perspective can improve our craft, a theoretical perspective can change how we think of the work itself. This can spark insights that generate new heuristics and breakthroughs.
For example, early in my career, I sensed a relationship between the work I’d learned to do as an architect and the work I was doing designing software. I found no practical manual on how to do this, so I hypothesized connections between the two fields. These connections were not “practical” in the sense that they hadn’t been informed by the craft of designing software. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t useful; they helped give me a perspective that changed the way I approached the work. I tested the theory and developed a set of practical heuristics as a result of this perspective.
This interplay between theory and practice has served as the foundation of my career. I see them as counterparts, not opposites: Theory informs and enriches practice, and practice validates and evolves theory. There’s a place for both in the designer’s toolkit.
My friend Christina Wodtke recently published a book called Pencil Me In. It’s aimed at encouraging “people who can’t draw” to draw more, especially in a business context. (You should get it even if you don’t think you fit that description — it’s really for everyone.) She kindly gave me a copy of the book autographed with the following directive:
Never stop drawing to think!
I love that. (Thanks, Christina!)
People assume the main reason to draw is so they can communicate something to someone. “A picture is worth a thousand words,” they’ve been told. So they draw — sometimes reluctantly.
Drawing to think is in one sense drawing to communicate. The difference is you’re communicating with an audience of one: you. You’re getting the abstractions out of your head and onto a medium where they can be made tangible, where you can examine them and iterate on them. A shitty first draft.
When you draw to think, your pencil and paper and hand and eyes and nervous system become one thing working in concert. You create a feedback loop: “This one goes too far. Let’s try this… Not far enough. I see what happened there. Wait. What if I did this to it? What would that do to the rest of the composition? Etc.”
Drawing to think has been central to my way of working for a long time. I’ve explored various ways of doing it, including using computers and iPads. These days I mostly draw on paper using black ink. When the time comes to share the ideas with others, I switch to the iPad to sketch something more polished.
Polished drawings are good when communicating with others, but rough ones are better for thinking. Thinking requires iteration: one more drawing… one more drawing… one more drawing. That calls for speed, and quick is rough, at least for me. That’s ok! This audience-of-one can see through the mess.
You may be familiar with Philippe Starck’s Juicy Salif citrus squeezer:
It’s a beautiful object (although I’ve heard it’s not a very functional citrus squeezer.) Juicy Salif looks organic, as though it emerged from the natural world somehow. It didn’t — it emerged from a feedback loop between Starck and a placemat in a pizzeria on the Amalfi coast. Here’s a photo of the placemat:
Look at all those little sketches! This is a picture of Starck’s mind exploring the problem space for this artifact. It’s not a record of his thinking process — it’s where the thinking happened. An important distinction. (Check out Andy Clark’s book Supersizing the Mind for a deeper description of how these feedback loops work.)
Drawing to think is central to design. If you don’t do it already, I strongly encourage you to establish the practice. Christina’s book is a great place to start. That said, you don’t need much instruction — just get the feedback loop going in whatever way works best for you. It’ll help you think better.
My family and I spent a pleasant afternoon in the East Bay Mini Maker Faire. There were lots of hands-on creative stations with activities for the whole family. One was a cramped woodworking shop where kids could build small race cars out of a block of wood and four large washers, and then race them down a slide.
The activity itself was basic, even if the kids were into it. After helping my son build his car, I was drawn to the writing on the workshop’s wall:
Designers
consider objects + systems
Look Closely
Turn on your senses!
What are the parts?
Who are the people?
Explore Complexity
Look for relationships
What’s happening? How? Why? What’s the system?
Find Opportunity
… for re-design, building, hacking, tinkering
I don’t know who wrote these, but I like them. Systems! An excellent primer for the kids, and a good reminder for makers of all ages.
