The Cloud of Creative Thinking with Prabhat Mahapatra

In this day and age, to meet the user’s endlessly evolving needs, innovation is a necessity, and a major driving force for that is creative thinking. Creative thinking aids a person’s problem-solving abilities by analyzing problems from fresh perspectives and synthesizing practical solutions. And when unorthodox ideas start flowing through creative thinking, that is when innovation strikes. However, these are never a constant stream of ideas as for most people, they are followed by something called a creative block. But how can Designeers cultivate creative thinking and deal with issues like a creative block to boost their problem-solving abilities and reach better and innovative solutions?

For getting the answers to all such questions, in the 39th episode, we interact with Prabhat Mahapatra, Design Manager at Adobe Design Lab. With professional experience of around two decades in the design industry, he holds his expertise in creative thinking, product, graphics, and space design. Let’s know more about his journey and experiences in the latest episode of the “Avantika Designeering Series” podcast, “The Cloud of Creative Thinking”.

Rohit Lalwani : Execution of ideas generated are very important. Moving from the domain operated by you Prabhat, creative thinking is a process of nurturing our imagination and promotes divergent thinking while we come up with creative ideas. I wish to ask, why is creative thinking essential and how can it be boosted by designers today?

Prabhat Mahapatra : A simple solution that we try at design labs is creatively thinking. Thinking is a process and solutions can vary based on how you are thinking and what mind space you are in. We practice a variety of brainstorming conversations and also practice story creations and add randomizations to the design process.

If one finds interesting ways of going through that process and he would have interesting solutions at the end of the journey.

Rohit Lalwani: Adobe’s Photoshop is used by over ninety percent of the world’s creative professionals. Adobe’s creative community on Behance has over twenty-four million members who use it to showcase their work and to find inspiration.

Companies today build user-friendly products and also provide a variety of features such as new technology and advanced capabilities. What is your definition of simplicity and how do you apply it to product design?

Prabhat: As designers, our focus should be, “Is it simple enough for the end-user?” or “Are we looking at the right set of end-users?”, more often, we get into a rut of a design process. We design something, validate it with a couple of users, they either say a yes or a no, and we come back to the drawing board or move forward to the development process.

I believe simplicity or minimalism in design is a bit overused, and there is a very fine line between making something simple and oversimplifying things.

This needs to change, with how the technology is changing, how the prototyping capabilities are changing across the industry of how open the term design is becoming within the industry itself. We need to re-look at asking the right questions and not just focusing on providing simple solutions.

The questions need to be complex and only then they would lead to simple solutions. I keep asking, the folks around me that if it is okay to validate your solution with the actual user that you are looking at, for the apps, from the data that you have received from, research, but did you try showing this to your parents? How did they find the solution? Did they even understand the solution? Maybe that security person is the best user to break any bias that you might have for your solutions. The term critical thinking needs to be added to our definition of design. Products should be built in a manner which is user-simplified and should be user-centric.

The design should not be over-simplified to an extent that it is not further usable.

Rohit Lalwani: Design and innovation have received plenty of attention over the last few decades because they are seen as a tool for creating sustainable futures. I wish to ask how do design and technology play a role in design and innovation and how it has been changing and shaping up?

Prabhat: Design and technology have been used as different words for a long time, one coming after another. In the past either it was technology first and a solution was designed around it or we came up with a design problem, a user need and identify technologies that could enable us to solve that problem.

But the way things are looking now, with how fast and blurred is the difference between technology prototyping, engineering development, design ideation is happening. We at design labs have started thinking of technology, not as a separate task which follows a design or comes before it but has to go alongside.

Technology needs to be looked at as a new tool that designers can use in their design process. It has become so easy these days to learn about new technologies, try them out by yourself, and more importantly, be able to play around with them that in itself allows for more ideas of how you can use that technology in more fun, useful manner for our users. Instead of looking at design and technology differently, designers should embrace thinking, talking, ideating with technologies at the back of their heads, and building on top of that.

Rohit Lalwani: At Avantika University we coined the term ‘Designeering’, which is the blended approach of design and engineering, and while you had the design lab at Adobe, where do you think both these worlds meet and do you think it is a relevant philosophy to coach the future talent?

Prabhat: Absolutely, one hundred percent. The terms design and technology cannot walk separate paths for us at design labs. We can no longer look at one without the other. As much as technology affects the users, they should be able to define the role that technology plays in their lives now and in the future. I love the word ‘Designeering’ that you guys have come up with.

Mr Prabhat answers many more questions related to the domain of Design and Technology. To know more about the same, head to the latest episode of Avantika Designeering Podcast. For more details, do visit our profile.