Do, then think
The importance of action in a design process
A few years back, we were at a fact-gathering meeting with a client and some collaborators. The design problem ahead of us was complex, and it involved many audiences and stakeholders. We were not sure if we knew what we would design, exactly. The room was full of articulate, engaging people. We were soaking in the information, listening to various points of view, asking questions and trying to digest the content and the possibilities.
Toward the last portion of the meeting, when it seemed like we would need to figure out the next steps, a second round of debate emerged, with several what-ifs and further hypotheticals being brought up. The bubbling conversation spilled into various conjectured solutions—we could pursue so and so, or we could build this other thing, or perhaps we can analyze the potential merits of this separate path altogether. I felt an anxious cringe of impatience and looked over at my partner — we were the only designers in the room — and we knew we needed to wrap things up. The time had come to start figuring out how to make concrete sense of the discussion and chart a path forward.
As intriguing as the conversation was, it seemed circuitous to debate further without a concrete model in front of us, without at least a sketch. The meeting had served its purpose — we had obtained information — but the group was starting to attempt to solve a design problem without actually designing, a common issue in our field. We sensed the meeting would go on forever without us intervening, so we started packing our things and politely started to talk about the next meeting, careful not to have a meeting where the only actionable item is “have more meetings.”
Most of these early meetings end with us saying something like we will “go away, think about it, do some studies, and bring back something for us all to react to…” It’s our way of ensuring that we stay focused in the broader goals of the project. As critical as it is to gather research, at some point, things must be attempted, drawn up, prototyped — in other words, designed.
This need to think things thoroughly before doing them is understandable and absolutely critical in many other fields. You certainly would not want your surgical team to “wing it” and get back to you once they are done looking around your insides. But creativity and design are different matters altogether, and they often require the action to come first. To act without a plan is reckless in many walks of life, but it is often an important first step in creativity.
I had a professor in design school that would gently but clearly show his impatience with speculative, what-if discussions. If one of us came into class saying something like “I was going to do this…” he would stop us short and ask why we hadn’t actually done it. He would implore us each session to keep our hands busy, keep drawing, keep sketching, and not get caught “staring at the ceiling” waiting for an idea to come before making marks on a page. This ethos was established early— talk is cheap, do something — and this impatience with overanalyzing has stayed with me ever since.
It’s a crutch I see in a lot of my own students now. Sometimes they come into critiques with empty hands and bring up reasons like “I was thinking a lot about the project but didn’t get a chance to design it/draw it/put it together,” or “I have this general abstract idea but wanted to see what you thought first…” Those breeds of apologies are common and remind me of my younger self too much, and the impatience returns. I attempt to gently remind people of the same lesson—I ask them to go back home, put a study together, and come back next class with something concrete to discuss.
Many of the projects I assign have this idea embedded into them, some more explicitly than others. In one exercise, I ask the class to scavenge around campus and find materials to integrate into an experimental image-making endeavor. They have a time limit and an imperative to act, and they are given their assignment only after finding their materials, so they cannot overthink anything as they have no idea what they will be asked to do. Usually the given assignment is an open-ended prompt that serves as a launching point for further exploration, and they have to respond to the prompt using only what they have in front of them. (This past semester, during the pandemic, the assignment was adjusted to have students gather elements they could find without leaving their homes — embracing a state lockdown and turning it into a design constraint—you can see some of this work right below)
Exercises like these become elaborate excuses to act, to not get caught in our heads, and to think with our hands. The clock starts to tick, and you must generate a result, forethought be damned. These activities often result in exciting visuals, but that’s a bonus. The compositions are not the only goal—the actual objective is to challenge the belief that one needs to be inspired before getting to work. The process is kinetic; it forces engagement at all stages. The action itself is often the only muse you need. As Todd Henry insightfully argues in The Accidental Creative, “action breeds motivation, not the other way around.” It is possible—and many times, essential—to let your design instincts take the lead without the luxury of a fully formed idea in your back pocket.
Design is a verb, not just a noun. It is an act we engage with in order to find answers, not merely an optical coating we apply to a solution that is already there. Doing the work is part of the answer. This is a life-long lesson we must repeatedly relearn, especially when we get frustrated that we don’t know how to approach something or we are hesitant to invest hours on an idea we haven’t entirely resolved our heads first. Nothing in design comes into being when only overanalyzing—things must be coaxed into life via action.
This notion has broader ramifications beyond just getting out of a funk or getting going on a project. In How to Find Fulfilling Work, Roman Krznaric ponders this existential balance between thought and action as it applies to a broader scale — how we build our careers. Most young people assume that figuring out what to do with our lives requires endless hours of thoughtful introspection before carefully setting forth and executing a plan. “You must think deeply about what you want to do, then you do it,” we are told, over and over again, by well-intentioned adults and career counselors. But things don’t quite function that way. Debating in a vacuum about whether or not you should become a veterinarian or a designer or an entrepreneur is often ineffective. Krznaric urges us to “Act First, Reflect Later,” to try out different careers and vocations before settling into the final profession we commit to. He urges us to prototype our working lives, to try things out, to test things out—the way any designer looks at any project—then stand back and think about those experiences, and go from there.
In the 2011 animated film Waking Life, there is a scene I think about now and then in this regard. Four characters walk down a street, each spewing pretentious anarchist language about the things that will save the world, the things that they ponder as they seek to salvage humanity. As they ramble on, they come upon an older man who has climbed atop a street pole and seems stranded, lost. They ask him if he needs help, and he declines, saying he’s “not sure” what he’s doing up there. The four guys walk away, initially mocking the “stupid bastard,” until one of them crystallizes the difference: “…No worse than us. He’s all action and no theory; we’re all theory and no action.”
Of course, we need both theory and action; we need both reckless exploration and focused discipline. But more often than not, especially early in a project or early in our careers, the reluctance to act first is an overlooked obstacle. It helps to remember that a coherent, fully formed idea is not a prerequisite to start the work of designing. There are many small steps we need to take in order to get to a fully formed result, a myriad of micro-decisions that must add up, slowly, over time. We often just need to start — start drawing, start making, start moving, start tracing that first line on paper, start up that laptop, start getting that rough first draft on the table. Do something first. Then think about it. Repeat.
When we returned to our following meeting with our client, we brought in a very unrefined visual of what we had captured from the previous discussion. It was certainly not final, and it went through many rounds of iterations afterward, but it was gratifying to see the group’s reaction that day. The preliminary study made sense to them. It managed to articulate — at a glance — many issues we had all wrestled with in the meeting prior. Of course, it then led to further discussions, further thoughts, further theories, but the tone was set. Thought and action, theory and practice, would work hand in hand the rest of the way.
