shobhan s

overcoming stuckness

2023 tagged with: tutorials filed under: teaching

when coming up with ideas, what happens if your best idea doesn’t feel strong or exciting enough? when stuck like this, designers usually lose time “thinking”, indulge in needless “brainstorming”, regularly jump to other ideas (and experience stuckness there again), and eventually use cheap tricks to try and embellish tepid concepts. (books on design methods¹ do enrich a designer’s vocabulary² and repertoire, but typically stop short from advising on ways to objectively hack fledgeling ideas.)

well,
i function as a tutor with jignesh khakhar’s new media design programme (graduate studies) at the national institute of design in india ; and this is a collection of approaches/techniques i’ve employed to help students overcome stuckness during their problem-solving³ projects.

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write, and rewrite (the project brief), phrasing it differently each time. (if used well, metaphors and—terse, poetic—concept-statements can be very powerful. small changes in a written statement can effectively jettison a project onto a different mode, medium or track.⁴)

work on your subject:

• dive deeper into the subject ; speak with a domain expert; observe better; continually articulate your grasp of subject-matter to non-experts (to help sharpen your own understanding).
• when overwhelmed by the vastness of a subject-area, focus on a specific aspect within the subject.
• look at allied or opposing subject-areas, and force yourself to make (seemingly obtuse/abtruse) connections.

wander:
ideas are only starting points (i.e., “anchors” within our “areas of enquiry”) ; designers have to be given the courage\tools to wander (smartly, of-course).

play with time:

• “zoom in” to focus on a few moments within a larger interaction, or even narrow your entire focus on only one segment of your choreography⁵.
• “zoom out” to observe your project within a much longer time-span.
• “shift” and observe the same concept in a different moment of time; a shifted time-period (past/future), perhaps.
• “speed up” or “slow down” the rate at which things happen, and look for fractures opportunities within your interaction choreography⁶.

similarly, play with space (and context):

• “zoom” in-and-out, and look at larger, smaller, or disproportionate spaces (and contexts).
• “placement”: “shift” your concept on to different places, spaces, and contexts.
• you may also modulate multiplicity and scale. (“what if we had many or just one?” and “what if something was larger or smaller?”.)

pay attention to users people:

• see how the brief (or concept) changes if we make small or large changes to attributes of people (disposition, current mindset, quantity, distribution) within our problem-frame.
• and, once again, you can “zoom” in to or out of specific demographics (by narrowing or widening your filters for age, gender, ethnicity, etc), or see how your concept holds up when “shifted” to a {slightly/very} different cultural context.

make (to think); early and often:

• write, make, document, present (and listen!) — repeatedly — in short cycles.
• use iterative ideation processes⁷ before each “making” (prototyping) phase, and keep making small changes within the composition or choreography⁵.
• making can involve paper, clay, found objects, or pretty-much anything ; body-storms even.
• produce as little detail as possible (and raise resolution⁸ and fidelity⁸ with successive prototypes).
• force yourself to use different media. if the project is purely visual, try to make it using just sound ; it may not be a solution, but it may help you see hear things differently (and get you unstuck).
• if there is too much uncertainty, and you lack the tools or time to resolve things before a “make”-cycle, then: pay attention to your dissatisfactions, make assumptions (and write them down clearly), and just narrow the brief down enough to make something. remember, “when stuck, write and make”.
• when relevant, try to make participatory experiential prototypes, and give them to people to play with. afterwards, don’t ask people “does it work”⁹ : ask them to “describe their experience” instead.

choreograph!:

• sketch and storyboard ; rapidly, crudely, copiously.
• play-act a conversation between an object/space and the person.
• storytelling—whether to describe a context, a problem, or an idea—is a preferred means of presentation.
• when involving others in testing your prototypes, be sure to choreograph their experience well (and: puppeteer, fake, make-believe, and wizard-of-oz shamelessly).

sometimes, it helps to flip things over: thinking about how to make the problem worse (akin to reverse brainstorming), or adapting the idea for a completely different combination of time/space/people.

essentially,
we use these methods (listed above) to open up new perspectives.

depending on the stage of the project, the proximity to a deadline, and the capacity of persons to handle things, i take “stances” when reviewing progress or giving feedback on a project. i may ask for things to be blown open with full optimism (“think freely!”), or be quite critical (“let’s narrow things down a bit, shall we?”), or encourage more practical thinking (“how will this get made?”)¹⁰; or even put on some other hat¹¹. at the end of a session, though, i do ask, “so, what shall we do next?”, so that there’s a plan forward (to try and snuff the stuckness out).

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as we move further along a project, it helps to keep these triads in mind:

• every project involves a balance between the concept, any effects used to present it, and the affect it invokes in people. any of these three (concept, effect or affect) can serve as triggers to a (solving, staging or speculating) project, as long as a designer is comfortable wandering beyond the starting-point.
• while prototyping an experience, we take a concept, and translate it intentionally into a representation. this representation of an experience comprises three c’s: a composition (spatial) and its choreography (temporal)¹² placed within a context (cultural).⁵

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footnotes:

shobhan s