Designers Are Full of Bad Ideas
All of my ideas are bad.
Every. Single. One. And yet, I still keep having them.
My brain is chalked full of inconsistencies, inaccuracies, & incomprehensible iterations of interactions. I stonewall good decisions and necessary processes, spout nonsensical thoughts while opining about the obscure, and pontificate about prognostications that will never come to pass.
If you think that designers possess some genetic predilection to being creative or finding intuition floating through the ether, you’re wrong. We’re just like everyone else out there. Creativity is not unique to creatives. Out-of-the-box thinking is not something that we’ve cornered the market on, buzzwords be damned.
Anyone is capable of coming up with a novel thought. Anyone can figure out a new and better way of doing things, but most don’t. Most people are fine with not rethinking something, or if something needs to be examined or thought out, they seek out someone to do it for them.
But why do they come to us? What makes our creative juices less viscous than the average Jane? After all, I just said in the snag-your-attention opening line:
All of my ideas are bad.
The answer, dear reader, is that they come to us because we know how to find a good idea. We eventually come to the correct, or a correct, solution. In all of the mire of ideating, under the mass of all of the post-its, buried deep within the darkest sketch book, a bad idea can turn into a good one.
To the outside viewer though, I’m sure the creative process is a total mystery. Problem goes in, idea comes out. What happens in the middle can only be explained by the magic of “creativity”.
Creativity isn’t magic.
Creativity isn’t hard. (well, it is, but let me be hyperbolic for a sec)
You can have good ideas too.
Here’s the secret:
Step 1
Allow yourself to have as many ideas as possible.
Sketch, doodle, draw, write on napkins, write on whiteboards, write on unsuspecting coworkers. Don’t worry about whether or not you’ll be able to go back and read them. Don’t worry if they look good, make sense, can, should, or have been done before.
Reach into the weird parts of your brain, and scoop out all of the goop that you find onto whatever medium is handy. Don’t sit on it. The second you have it, get it out of your mind, or else you’ll lose it. Ideas are shy. They peak their heads out, wave their amorphous hands in greeting, and then slink back into the hole that they came from.
Don’t allow them to go back. Get them out. You’ll remember them later, just because you gave conscious effort to making it real. Save the napkins, bbq stains and all.
Step 2
Label all of your ideas as bad ideas.
This is important. All of the primordial goop you just excreted needs to be treated as such. They are not good. They are terrible, ambiguous, and without their own legs to stand on. Do not fall in love with them.
They are guilty until proven innocent.
Step 3
Prove them innocent.
Do the research, test them against real world examples, prototype, refine. Gather research with your target market, clients, coworkers, neighbors, strangers on the street.
When they fail, because most of them will, throw them away. Do not get married to your idea, no matter how much people ooohhhed and ahhhed when you first told them about it. If it doesn’t work, start looking for one that does immediately.
Step 4
Repeat.
Often people look at ideas as this etherial revelation from heaven moment. When you read about Issac Newton’s apple falling, you might have had some picture in your head about a wigged dude sitting under a tree, just hanging out, maybe thinking about lunch, when boom. Apples fall, gravity exists.
That’s not how this works. If you’re expecting something ground breaking to just slap you in the face without expecting it, you’re probably going to be let down.
Designers and other creatives spit out as many different possible scenarios and ideas as they can, and in doing so, they allow their minds to discover the connections, often later when conducting some other mundane task. Your brain will process information that you’ve told it is important even when you’re not thinking about it. Writing something down, tells it “hey, this was worth wasting ink on”. I’m sure Newton was toying with a thousand and a half different explanations for a dozen problems, when he saw one thing that merged them all together.
Eureka isn’t a singular moment, it’s a culmination of weeks, days, or years, of having bad ideas finally turn into a good one. Often revelation comes right at the moment when we feel like all of the options have been exhausted. Only yesterday, I came to a sudden good idea for a project that I felt like I would never understand. After one thousand and one bad ideas, I finally had what I hope is a good one. Only testing will tell.
So the next time you start a project, or have someone tell you your idea is bad, or wrong, or stupid, don’t be surprised. Don’t get down. The creative mind is fed by bad ideas just like the one you had, and you’ll have dozens more along the way.
Your ideas are bad. And having them isn’t a bad thing at all.
I’m a UX designer in Nashville. Check out my work on my website. I occasionally tweet, but most of the time I spend time with my wife. She’s a lifestyle blogger and an incredible lady. Also, Hondo, our Bernese mountain dog is pretty cool too.
