Idea Lab: Season 1 wrapped up this week. Housed snugly in Source DC’s conference room, each session worked through a different topic. The first session investigated thinking spaces.
Any space can be a thinking space, but thinking spaces are areas intended for thinking and creativity. Meeting rooms, workshops, laboratories, and artist studios are great thinking-space examples. These spaces are intended to shelter particular kinds of communication and creativity. The laboratory, workshop, and artist studio are usually well-suited to the mental and physical tasks of their inhabitants. Meeting rooms and collaboration areas in offices are usually dismal failures.
Offices are usually designed with command and control in mind. Areas where people come together usually have a dissemination locus with various reception fields. Most commonly, the dissemination locus is at the end of a long, rectangular table and just in front of a whiteboard or screen. The reception areas are pretty much everywhere else with a chair. You can find the dissemination locus by walking into a conference room and asking, “Where would the boss sit?”
This basic design problem, the dissemination-reception problem, affects the thinking that the space promotes, the nature of the ideas expressed, and how people respond to ideas. The dissemination-reception problem’s nuances are different for different groups, but one strategy that goes a long way is expanding the dissemination locus.
The dissemination locus can be expanded by:
1. Using modular furniture. Ditch the big rectangle for smaller tables that can be wheeled around or removed entirely. The room can then be reconfigured to match the ideas: classroom, small groups, round table, etc.
2. Whiteboard everywhere. There’s no point in having a surface in a meeting room (or office for that matter) that you can’t write on or easily post ideas on. Design firms know this. Our large corporate clients often do not. Wall-to-wall magnetic whiteboard costs a little more to build and maintain, but the ideas people create and share will pay for the investment. Plus, you’re paying for those walls, shouldn’t they be working for you.
These two solutions, along with an abundant supply of paper, pens, sticky notes, markers go a long way to making an office meeting room a real thinking space. Add a little collaboration and communication training, and people can fully escape the dissemination-reception trap.
Massimo Vignelli is one of our greatest living designers. One of the core tenants of his design philosophy is: if you can design one thing, you can design everything. He is referring to the discipline of design, but what he is really talking about is process.
What Vignelli speaks to is the power of process, a solid thought process, to solve a variety of problems. Design tools—line, curve, color, type, image, sketching, modeling, proportion, the grid, the layout—are employed in various ways throughout the process. A solid process helps the thinker understand the problem or challenge at hand in its uniqueness, investigate its history, and play with ways of addressing it. A solid process does is not a stock way of creating design, business, political, or any other kind of solution; a solid process helps you see the unique situation at hand, work through and identify a solution, and make that solution real.
Understanding Vignelli is essential for designers, but also valuable for anyone interested in better thinking and a living example of the power of process.
Vignelli Interview with Debbie Millman @ Design Observer
Vignelli’s design principles are summarized in the book, The Vignelli Canon, available as a free PDF.
You’ve done the research, developed your solution, and taken it through enough iterations that you are ready to share it with others. How you present your ideas will affect understanding, adoption, and implementation. Here are two great typography-basics resources.
Ray Elder, a designer and design professor, list 34 typography sins to avoid. Matthew Butterick created Typography for Lawyers, a great website and guide to incorporating excellent typography into documents. While he focuses on legal documents, the principles apply equally well to business, technical, and other documents.
Sketches, iterations, prototypes, working large, sketch walls, massive whiteboards—these are all part of the design thinking process. What does it look like when it all comes together? The video below shows sketches, massive whiteboards, prototypes, and how ideas develop and grow. It is from fueseproject’s (Yves Behar’s design studio) work in designing the new Sayl chair for Herman Miller.
After more than 70 prototypes and extensive testing, the Sayl chair emerged using fewer components than similar chairs, costing less than Herman Miller’s Aeron and Embody chairs, wearing Herman Miller’s 12-year warranty, and bursting with design choices around sustainability. Sayl is a great chair inspired by the Golden Gate Bridge, but it is also the tangible representation of the design thinking process and visual thinking tools used in creating it.
When faced with 16 options, you are faced with a situation where bad decisions are likely.
Our brains aren’t good at dealing with a multitude of options. Fight, flee, surrender—those are options we’re fantastically well designed to cope with. With a large number of options there just isn’t enough working memory to go around. We have trouble holding both the information about each option and the results of our thoughts about that information.
Solution? Break your 16-option decision down into tiers. Break it down into 4 groups of 4. Choose the best of each group and then hold another heat. Decision clusters all you to dedicate more memory and processing to each unit and still accomplish the task of choosing the best of the 16 options.
Creative processes often resemble or require studying. The New York Times printed a great article about good study habits that run contrary to common beliefs about how we learn.
Mix it up. Mixed practice is better than working a single type of problem. We need to learn how to identify which skill to apply and how to apply the skill.
Move around. A variety of locations is better than a single location. Changing study locations increases retention. Environments with a view are even better.
Once more, with feeling. Spaced repetition works. Long-term retention is better supported by gradual, repeated study than cramming.
Understanding your resources and the challenges you face requires study. These ideas can make the problem solving process faster, easier, and more effective.
Why process?
Everyone has idea generation and problem solving processes. People often resist this idea until they are asked what they did the last time they had to come up with a complicated plan. “Well, first I . . ., then . . . .” These are the signs of an underlying process.
Why should you explore process?
How you think is something that touches every moment of your life and is deeply connected to your happiness and success in life. How you approach challenges affects your ability to create solutions and the effectiveness of those solutions. A small improvement in how you think, create ideas, and solve problems will have huge impact on how you live and act as that improved process is used thousands and thousands of times.
How to get started?
Think about how you See, Solve, and Act. Look at the questions here and ask yourself how you would go about answering these questions. Seeing, solving, and acting can be thought of as a simple process model. Finding your process begins with looking at how you see, solve and act in your daily life.
Seeing, solving and acting are the essential components of everything you do.
Better thinking improves and accelerates how you see, solve and act. Learn more.
