Before you can think out of the box, you have to know what the box is. Then innovation can happen within those constraints.
In the early days of Apple, when I was the Sales and Technical Representative for the Caribbean Region as the Macintosh was being launched, a television ad for the Mac was produced but never released. It showed a roomful of the first Mac computers sitting on classroom desks, watching a man at the head of the room at a desk, making notes, throwing them out, retrieving them from the trash bucket on the floor. The voice over explained what he was doing, and the ad ended with a phrase that effectively told us that the Mac was different because it “learned Man”. It was learning a set of constraints to be innovative.
At least, that’s what I got out of it, and was how I approached selling the benefit of the Graphical User Interface with its icons of things you would see on and around a work space, the idea of not typing but pointing at objects, clicking and dragging, and the ethos of responding to non-typed instructions for guiding the computer to do what one wanted it to do.
User experience was being invented as a field, as was Interface Design, Human Centered Design, and the paradigms of “design thinking”, culled out of a variety of processes and practices that focused on creating FOR people, not creating out of the sole inspiration and desires of the creator, whether it was a product or a service or even a process or experience.
History lesson done, and now, working with people who are designing “things” for other people, and I’ve caught a few ideas that give me an indication what will work and what won’t in that formative process. Creativity, curiosity, certainly. Bravery to take on the risk of failure, yes. And, being focused not on satisfying one’s own ego, but resolving a problem or delighting the person one is designing for…that’s paramount. Makes design thinking sound kind of selfless and noble, doesn’t it?
Watch the podcast if you’d like to hear me talk about constraints and innovation, as “necessity is the mother of invention” gets a new twist.
