Get comfortable with ambiguity
Sometimes—at work—we face complex challenges.
If you work in a creative branch (industrial design, user experience design, communication, advertisting, architecture), you might deal with briefs and tasks such as behaviour-change campaigns or embedding products that address global challenges.
No matter how specific the brief is, no matter how helpful and knowledgeable the client is, there’s always a big gap left for ambiguity. The things we don’t know about the challenge, the audience, the customers, the users or what they’re after.
It’s scary at times. You don’t know where to start, but the potential of that empty space is immense. It’s an opportunity for us to build a playground for innovation.
To build the right playground you need to forget about some barriers (for a limited amount of time). You need to isolate the distracting agents and focus on your thinking. Let your curiosity and imagination emerge.
Dive in, head first
Wrap your head around the challenge. Gather all the inspiration, research, data and information you could possibly extract from your user groups or the client’s organisation. Pick up the phone if necessary, call your uncle or your cousin’s wife, if they are relevant users, or if you miss them. 🙃
They might share a story or slip a detail that could change everything.
Play, experiment and test
There has never been a limit to how many solutions or directions you can explore. Put your noise-cancelling headphones on and find a standing table or desk away from your coworkers or in your home office (standing helps!).
Play your favourite music, hold a couple of markers and lots of reused A4s or A3s. Create a mind map of what you know about the problem you’re solving.
Then follow your free flow of thoughts: write down any keyword that comes to mind that might contribute to solving the problem — quickly — without overthinking. Anything.
You need to write and draw. Visualise anything that comes to mind; rough design sketches, wireframes, layouts, people interacting, scenes, stories.
You don’t have to spend too much time on this open exercise; 20 to 40 minutes brainstorming this way will give you some clarity. It will give you some idea hooks.
Once you gained that confidence in your idea directions, share them. Bring the drawings to your creative director, your CEO or your client and discuss them. Walk them through your thinking and explain that these are only rough directions, but with massive potential.
Connect any existing visual inspiration (photos, exisiting graphic examples, physical examples) and you’ll have it! Your amazing masterplan, born from a question mark.
