The Joy of knowing nothing
When we are born, a process starts in which every single action, movement, thought, and experience gets registered in our brain.
Author: José A. Montenegro, Chief Design Officer at id.real
When we are born, a process starts in which every single action, movement, thought, and experience gets registered in our brain. In normal circumstances, and without any effort from our side, our brain absorbs, storages and manages all that information. Furthermore, this acquired data shapes our character — who we are, how we behave, how we act when faced with a challenge- and builds our knowledge base.
Consciously or unconsciously, we access it every time we face similar situations and rely on it to solve the task present in front of us. Our experiences determine every single action we take. Therefore, our habits are framed based on external stimuli, thus shaping our brain.
It is wonderful to see kids learning how to do something for the first time. The expression on their faces, the joy of conquering something that wasn’t conquered before, it’s just amazing. As adults, when we get to see a person learning something for the first time, we often remember how it was for us: how we felt the first time we understood what need it to be done to solve that particular problem in front of us.
Over time, our learning process becomes second nature, directed mostly towards the performance of a given set of skills effortless and as quickly as possible. These experiences get to be fewer and fewer over time, and once we get training over something we do fall into a rhythm of reiteration.
But as time passes and the world keeps evolving, how we overcome the challenges in front of us need to be changed as well. As designers, it’s in this situation when we realize that all our preconceptions need to be put aside to really see things under a different light. We need to allow ourselves to feel lost, to feel uncertainty. We are not trained to unlearn things we already know, but now in order to truly innovate we need to do so.
However, it’s a necessary process that takes time. We have to learn to forget our previous learned lessons. We need to reconnect with that moment when we learned that an object we liked made a sound every time we threw it into the floor, the feeling of the sand in our hand slipping between our fingers for the first time, our first step, the first time we said “Mom” and got a response.
In the end, what we need is to surrender ourselves to the unknown. We need to come back to the moment we face a new challenge and start over again processing information, asking questions we didn’t ask before. And when this happens our brain will reconnect with that feeling of learning something for the first time, ways that had long been forgotten. It will find other paths of connection and it will be reshaped. We’ll start seeing things from a different perspective.
The first task inside our studio was designing toys, particularly beach toys. In the beginning, all the years working and designing kicked in into finding solutions throughout market research, ergonomy, trends, competitors, the beach, the sand, water, and all the elements that might come in contact with our design. What about the users? You may ask; well we did research with them too, both children and parents alike, because even though we knew the quantitative data, we were missing the human data.
We, and in particular I, weren’t looking at the task at hand in an innovative way, we weren’t asking the right question, we weren’t looking for the right answer. It was at this moment where all the previously acquired knowledge had to be put aside. Even with all the empirical data in our hands, both quantitative and qualitative, we were missing something: we needed to be 5 years old again, and see the world as children do. Experience the beach and the sand and the water and the wind for the first time again. We needed to unlearned everything we knew to see the real problem, to find the right solution.
That’s what we did and it wasn’t easy but once it was done… we realized that all that we were looking for was right in front of us the whole time. As children, we knew what frustration looks like: that bucket filled with sand that doesn’t provide us with the perfect shape. And that was it, the spark, the real starting point of Kebrick.
The excitement of discovering new ways to face old problems, the feeling of being amazed by ourselves for the first time in years. It feels good to experience again the joy of knowing nothing.
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