Design: Empty your Cup

There is an often shared Zen story that goes something like this:

“The Japanese master Nan-in gave audience to a professor of philosophy. Serving tea, Nan-in filled his visitor’s cup, and kept pouring. The professor watched the overflow until he could restrain himself no longer: “Stop! The cup is over full, no more will go in.” Nan-in said: “Like this cup, you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup.”

And then it goes further: you might empty your cup and then call it “empty”, but it is now full of emptiness. This is still not good enough, in fact, it is said that you need to crush your cup.

“Evolving” something gives you a starting place, be it tools or a concept. Sometimes design requires you to reinvent the world (or part of it) from the ground up. If your cup is full, you cannot find that beautiful pattern, that simple association of ideas, or that full on crazy hypothesis that leads to a brilliant invention. To be able to design game changers in particular, we need to adapt very quickly to new and emerging concepts, and then persevere. It’s not about gorging yourself with everything blasting through your head, everything that you know from years of experience, but rather having the ability to notice a reoccurring theme, an overall pattern, and apply that thought or insight to your own immediate environment.

From a design perspective, our cup is full when we think we already have a solution before doing the research, seeing the numbers or really exploring the problem. Going broad, turning the problem over from different perspectives and lenses, trying it nth different ways and seeking feedback are some of the means we have to empty our cups. Our prior experience needs to feed into our new work, giving it depth and more avenues through which to explore, rather than ramming us down a well trodden path.

There is virtue in not reinventing the wheel, reusing patterns that work, and common sense, but the trick is to not let it blind us to a better way forwards. As we inventory in our minds the tools we know work, we need to kick the tyres on each one first and seek to understand the problem holistically.

Understanding the problem intuitively rather than intellectualising it, means that we can experience it rather than understand it. This is uncomfortable territory because we prefer the predictable over the unknown.

Remember: it’s not just another login form, it’s an opportunity to rethink the whole concept, audit it and make sure it still has rationale. It’s an opportunity to think about it in a new environment, and give it a new perspective.

Alvin Toffler said it well:

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn”.