How Heuristics Drive the Creative Process
In the creative field, the ability to make quick, effective decisions is critical. Big ones, small ones — every decision could impact the outcome of your project. As such, creative professionals must develop their arsenal to navigate the never-ending path of decisions toward their desired destination.
Enter heuristics — The simple mental shortcuts that guide our choices through recognizable patterns. By enabling us to make better choices, faster, heuristics are a powerful ally in a creative professional’s toolkit.
Heuristics in the creative process
The term heuristic comes from the Ancient Greek word εὑρίσκω (heurískō) meaning ‘I find, discover’ and the concept was first introduced by cognitive psychologist Herbert A. Simon in the 1950s explaining a pattern of decision-making used when people have limited information and other constraints.
The creative process involves hundreds and sometimes thousands of quick decisions, we rely on heuristics to navigate those decisions.
They are critical tools in the creative professionals’ arsenal. Our education starts with many key heuristics such as:
- Designing for a target audience and not oneself
- Using negative space to create balance and contrast
- Using asymmetry to create tension and visual interest
- Using the Rule of Thirds to create dynamic compositions
On the path from novice to mastery, we pick up a multitude of heuristics along the way. We learn from mentors, clients, managers, and colleagues, but most of all from experience. Over time, the master has confirmed some conventional wisdom but has also developed many heuristics of her own.
A couple of years ago, my wife and I were very close to buying a house. Everything was looking good and we got the green light from a building inspector, but we wanted to do some extra work on the place and decided to consult with an engineer. When I sent the inspection report with photos to the engineer, he immediately told me it wasn’t worth our time and money. He quickly pointed out that some of the water damage in the basement is a telltale sign of much greater structural damage.
Through his years of experience, he’s developed reliable heuristics that help him scope his effort and his clients’ priorities. He could’ve been wrong, but we weren’t going to (literally) bet the house on it.
The heuristic-driven approach
In the world of User Experience Design, Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics still holds as a starting point for building quality experiences on the web and software apps.
Ernest Hemingway had many heuristics and a favorite of mine is never empty the well in writing.
I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
— Ernest Hemingway
Hell, even drug dealers have a well-known heuristic — Don’t get high off your own supply.
In his book Anti-Fragile, Nassim Taleb goes in-depth about the false sense of security we get from data-driven decisions in complex environments and prefers to use heuristics. Ironically, Taleb’s background is as a quantitative analyst, and throughout his career, he observed the shortcomings of these complicated financial models and forecasts.
Essentially, in environments like the global economy and nature, we have too many unknowns and random events that are in play outside of the prediction model for us to draw any real conclusions.
Let’s take the example of a turkey at a farm (from Taleb’s book). For nearly a thousand days a turkey is fed by the farmer. Over that time frame, it comes to believe the farmer is its friend and provider, but then Thanksgiving season rolls around, and well… you know the rest of that story.
The turkey’s blindspot illustrates the shortcoming of these data-based prediction models. In this case, the farmer only kills the turkey one time and that’s the end. There is no model for predicting a one-time event that hasn’t happened yet.
While gathering data is important and helps us understand the overall landscape of things, we can’t become overly dependent because they offer incomplete models of reality.
This is why heuristics are critical tools for us. While they are also imperfect, they’re always accessible and can be quickly applied.
In the book Creative Selection, Ken Kocienda goes into depth about his experience working at Apple and building some of their central products like the Safari web browser and the iPhone. The book title itself is a play on the natural selection process in the theory of evolution. At Apple the design decisions go through this creative selection where teams are creating tons and tons of prototypes and over time, the best ones are selected and the prototypes that don’t hold up are discarded.
Through the process of creative selection, the team as a whole is developing their taste, but Apple also hires the best talent in their field, so the taste is already at a high benchmark. The product we as customers get to experience is the best product.
At Apple, designers created heuristics to set standards for the user experience such as the duration of an animation. Design heuristics were a counterpart to algorithms developed by engineers.
Kocienda contrasts the approach of design decisions at Apple with the way Google was making decisions at that time. At some point, Google was deciding on the best shade of blue for their buttons. They ran user tests on over 40 shades of blue to determine the best one. To Kocienda, this seemed absolutely ridiculous and a huge waste of resources.
What could these resource-intensive tests determine about the best shade of blue provide that a master graphic designer (equipped with an arsenal of heuristics) can’t? I’d take the master’s taste over the test results 10/10 times. There’s a place for data-informed decisions and this isn’t one of them.
However, heuristics are far from perfect
Heuristics have an obvious downside. Remember, they are decision-making shortcuts, the same kind that form our negative biases. We operate with as many negative and destructive heuristics as we do with positive ones.
The availability heuristic refers to our tendency to judge the likelihood of events based on the examples that quickly come to mind.
Heuristics can be informed by biases such as the Anchoring bias, when we rely too heavily on the first piece of information we get to make a decision.
Or Confirmation bias, our tendency to confirm existing beliefs and disregard information that contradicts them.
Each of these scenarios represents common decision-making shortcuts we take which often lead to erroneous decisions.
Heuristics are context-specific and not always applicable. They serve us best as loosely held tools, not as truths or undeniable rules.
Originally published on Boundless Canvas on April 3, 2023.
