Twitter-land and blog-world seem to favor the numbered list — ”top ten ways to improve your Google ranking,” ”top 20 tools for graphic professionals,” ”top three techniques to field dress a squirrel” — suggesting either an innate need in the authors to boil down complex thinking into discrete lists, or a particular hunger among browsers for categories and rankings within the ocean of online information.
Either way, these lists can be exercises in randomness or true thoughtfulness, often telling more about the author’s process and perspective than the particular subject at hand.
That said, I do like Garr Reynolds’ ”10 Tips on how to think like a designer,” as it offers both thoughtful tidbits and insights on the process by which they were distilled. Among them:
- Embrace constraints.
- Practice restraint.
- Adopt the beginner’s mind.
- Check your ego at the door.
- Focus on the experience of the design.
- Become a master storyteller.
- Think communication not decoration.
- Obsess about ideas not tools.
- Clarify your intention.
- Sharpen your vision & curiosity and learn from the lessons around you.
- Learn all the “rules” and know when and why to break them.
And yes, there are 11 (an old but effective gimmick when writing lists involving creative thinking). But the result is still of direct relevance and use, not only to designers, but to anyone who designs a process, a system, an organization, a initiative, or an intervention to make something better. That’s what arts and cultural managers do every day.
Add it to your numbered list of things to read.
BRAVO! one of the best “top ten” lists I’ve read in a while. and, agreed, it pertains to ways of being and doing – pretty universal. Thanks Andrew!
a distilled list which would offer ideas for many sorts of business and creative practice, I’m thinking. I’m a writer who writes mainly about music, and I can see points where all of these intersect in the music, the writing, and the business of doing both.
As you say, Andrew, these rules apply widely. I am co-authoring an undergraduate text on general relativity, and every one of these rules apply. We demand and reward with grades, Reading Memos from students telling us what they have difficulty with. The entire book is almost a science fiction story about exploring black holes.
And so on . . . .