Designer’s dilemma: illusions and creativity 5.44.02009

The argument between manager and designer never ends. The former fairly supposes that a good designer is the one who doesn’t self-express but answer client’s demands. The latter feels she can’t do well what doesn’t affect her in any way. Including personal affections is for her often the only way to give meaning to the task.

But there are ghosts threatening a designer who doesn’t reject the temptation of self-expression. It’s hard to tell a good solution from a personally appealing but unrelated image. Where experienced designers manage to combine personal involvement with seeing through client’s eyes, not so experienced ones tend to lose balance.

How to solve this problem? Removing everything personal from a design doesn’t necessarily make it any better. Everybody knows what a tired design is. It’s much worse than an imbalanced one, because it’s depressed and bears bad energy other people feel.

I am sure there is a much better solution. Instead of excluding designer’s personal touch, we have to go further and make it more meaningful. The major part of design errors and weird inventions appear under the influence of snap subconscious impulses and then get explained and linked to some meaningful ideas. But what if we start from the end and get the ideas first?

One of the effective means of doing so is to get feedback from yourself before the work starts. There is a lot of tools and techniques for generating interesting ideas without sinking into the dirty design work. The first ones that come to mind are Random Stimulus and Paraphrasing. Besides the obvious positive effect of getting interesting ideas, they surely help a designer to bridge the initial distance, better understand the task and get really involved. Then, having a range of ideas, directions and meanings, it’s much more easier for a designer to avoid boring design and unleash her creative potential.

Another thing to remember during design work is the need to decipher any subconscious weird images that come to mind instead of blindly rejecting them or rashly injecting them to the work. A short delay on this stage will be repaid latter. That doesn’t mean we should explain everything we do, but on some inner level we have to know the reasons it’s there. Such a deciphering effort often brings a lot of creative ideas.

And finally, there are not merely tools, but also entire frameworks, like Six Thinking Hats for example. Using such a frameworks, you constantly direct your attention, avoiding procrastination and getting much better results in lesser time.