What I learnt this week: Don’t Get Fooled By Creativity
A weekly reflection of what I have learnt this week within my work as a Digital Product Designer
This week I’ve been reading the book ‘Creative Confidence: Unleashing the creative potential within us all’ while on my travels to Iceland. The book is by David and Tom Kelley who run the world-famous IDEO agency. I got this book for Christmas as a Secret Santa, it had been sitting on my Amazon wishlist for quite some time as I’ve probably said many times before me and the word creativity has a difficult relationship.
I wanted to get this book as I believe that I’m not very creative, which for someone who has always wanted to be a designer and is a designer with 7 years experience sounds a bit off. When I got this book I was hoping that I would suddenly understand why I’m not that creative and then be able to produce better, more creative work.
The problem lies in what I define as better and more creative. I see creativity as visual design and flare. When I left university I originally started out as a branding designer where the focus is a lot on how the visual identity looks and rightly so, a brand has only once chance to make a first impression. While in this area of design I’d always feel that I wasn’t as creative as others in the industry. I always being told that my ideas and mock-ups were too safe not interesting enough, something that was a hangover from university. I’ve since shied away from branding and am now a digital product designer. I think the diversion into this niche was naturally and only a matter of time. I’ve always wanted to design things that have a point and value to them so the transition to product design happened without me even noticing, as logic and safety (through testing and iterating) are welcomed in this niche, slowly what I would consider creative dropped away and the make focus is now the experience and the users and less about the visual ‘wow’.
Since reading this book as put the word creativity into a new perspective for me. There is more to creativity than the visual output which I had boxed the term into. The problem with the word creativity is that it is a loaded word, we have high expectations of what that means and have a mental model of what creativity should look like.
There is an amazing antidote from the book that explains in the Tibetan language there is no word for creativity or to be creative, but in fact the closest to it is ‘natural’. When we are young we play, experiment and try things and this is what creativity is, this is being our natural selves until we go to school and are graded and told whether we are creative enough against a marking criteria. This is something I’ve mentioned before in other posts but fear of failing is not only a creativity killer but it also gets us bogged down. It takes out our enjoyment of our work and ultimately our job.
I really like the fact this book doesn’t focus on just the ‘Creative types’ like designers and artists, as I wholeheartedly agree that anyone can be can have interesting and inspiring ideas. You can be the CEO or the window cleaner, everyone can design and what I mean by that is curate a set of ideas into something new which is basically what creativity is.
I’m yet to finish the book but I feel that it’s been a beneficial read so far. I’ve started to recognise that perhaps it’s not that I lack creativity — I always have plenty of ideas but it’s actually my ability to execute them. I’m not saying I’m a bad designer, I just know I could do more to improve my visual design skills. Other than practising and doing more, I’m not quite sure how to do this so if you have any tips let me know!
How your week? Have you suffered from lack of confidence? What are your top tips to improve your creativity? Let me know your thoughts! If you want get in touch you can find me on Twitter as @LizHamburger
#WhatLizLearnt
