Creative Process
Iterate to Great. Failure is part of the process, so keep trying!
In the words of Sir John Hegarty (one of the UK’s most famous advertising creatives) in his fun little book on creativity…
“Creativity is all about exploration and going where no one has gone before. Just like an explorer… asking why is the key to starting the journey. The greatest creative people are great precisely because they hold on to a childlike simplicity and urge to question everything.
It’s the creatives who challenge accepted ways of thinking that end up making the very best work.
What does it take to be creative?
Fearlessness
You have to have the ability to pursue and present an idea that is genuinely fresh, that is as different as you can possibly make it. You’re putting your creative reputation on the line. Fearlessness is essential… you arrive with a new idea to pitch to a bunch of sceptics…
There are two approaches to the creative process, Chaos or Order
Chaos theory is followed by many creative companies. With very little structure and an atmosphere of mayhem, ideas get thrown around and timetables are ignored until panic sets in! Eventually out of this freewheeling, unencumbered atmosphere, greatness will (hopefully) emerge.
Chaos is scary, undisciplined and unpredictable.
The other possibility is to introduce some process… To ensure a smooth dependable development of an idea hopefully without restricting creativity.”
Hegarty’s most famous advert for Levi’s. The black sheep was so successful it would later become their company logo, representing their ability to think differently. But at the time Levi’s hated it and thought it would never work… how can you advertise jeans without showing jeans?
Chaos or Order?
A process of creative chaos is commonplace in highly creative industries. But it has some obvious drawbacks if the creative endeavour is something more dangerous than an advert. It would not be reassuring for instance to learn that the jet aircraft you’re flying in or the building you’re sitting in was designed by free-thinking creatives with no process or checks in place.
So engineers and developers have developed methods and processes that bring some order to the mess and some accountability to the people involved.
“One doesn’t manage creativity. One manages for creativity.”
Teresa Amabile and Mukti Khaire
The Need for Models
There are a huge number of models in existence, David Wynn and John Clarkson published an excellent review paper in July 2017 about this subject (the following material is all abridged from their paper). They look at a huge variety of models of the design and development process, representing it for different purposes and from different points of view. Any design and development process (DDP) will involve three key challenges and process models can be used to help address them:
Novelty
“Design processes seek to do something novel, once, whereas many other business processes seek to do the same thing repetitively”
In consequence, every design and development process is unique and involves a degree of uncertainty. New activities are typically discovered during projects; the process sequence is unpredictable, because tasks are progressively adjusted as work proceeds; and decisions must often be based on inadequate or preliminary information.
Complexity
Large-scale concurrent engineering in particular involves many tasks and individuals, a densely connected web of information flows, and many interdependent design issues that must be considered simultaneously. Feedback processes within a DDP are also significant drivers of dynamic complexity. For instance, bringing on new staff to handle a peak in workload may cause quality problems that require even more work to correct later on. DDP complexity seems to be increasing overall, for instance due to continuing introduction of new design issues and technologies, and increasingly fragmented disciplinary specialisation.
Iteration
It is well recognised that design and development are iterative in nature. Iteration can have numerous roles in the DDP, including: iteration to progress the design; iteration to correct problems or implement changes; and iteration to enable coordination within a process, or between a process and its context. Managing and exploiting iteration are critical to design and development on any scale, yet can be difficult in practice due to the many perspectives that are possible.
These characteristics and related issues mean that companies and individual designers may not fully understand the processes by which they generate their designs. In consequence, the DDP is difficult to execute and manage effectively. Cost and schedule overruns are common. Because effective design and development is critical to many organisations’ performance, this has motivated much research to better understand such processes and how they might be supported and improved. Critically, research shows that process models can help to address these challenges.
They may help to align process participants and their mental models. They are, therefore, important enablers of coordination, as the management of dependencies among activities. This becomes more important as complexity and innovation increase. Process, or prescriptive models depicting best practice may be useful ‘‘to rationalise creative work, to reduce the likelihood of forgetting something important, to permit design to be taught and transferred, to facilitate planning, and to improve communication between disciplines involved in design”.
Descriptive and Prescriptive.
From the point of view of a practitioner, the “abstract” and “procedural” quadrants of Wynn & Clarkson’s analysis are perhaps the most useful to your everyday practice. More loosely referred to as descriptive or prescriptive respectively. Descriptive models, try to describe how a process might look or be and much like my idea life cycle curve above, aim to communicate a complicated situation in simple terms that might help steer your thinking. Prescriptive models on the other hand, also known as Process Models, give you a framework to follow and might detail every step for you to follow.
Prescriptive models on the other hand try and make practitioners better at the design process. They were championed and developed in West Germany during the 60s and 70s, they believed that by following a method for controlling and strictly managing the chaotic and complex design and development process they could create a commercial competitive advantage.
The latest research now believes that although models can be helpful in understanding and handling the special characteristics of the design and development process, those same characteristics make its modelling extremely difficult. Despite extensive work undertaken since the 1950s, no single descriptive model is agreed to provide a satisfactory account of the design and development process.
Indeed, this is probably not achievable. Similarly, in terms of prescriptive models developed to support or improve the DDP, there is arguably still ‘‘no silver bullet approach to achieve process improvement”. This is again unsurprising considering the complexity of the topic and the many issues involved.
Despite these drawbacks, they should not be discounted and learning about a variety of different models will allow you to find one that is most suitable to your task.
VD 2221 - DIN German - VDI The Association of Engineers Collection (1985)
A nice early example of a complex design process model is that of Evans in 1959 who created a spiral cyclical model to show the steps in ship building. As each step in the design of a ship influenced every other it was not logical to follow a sequential linear process.
His process is iterative, starting with estimates and working inwards, each time refining design considerations until a balanced solution is reached. With each iteration, smaller modifications are made, and different methods can be used for each problem but also the problem becomes much more work intensive.
It’s relatively easy to do the outer rings but becomes harder at an increasing rate as you iterate towards the centre.
Two key things of note that are relevant beyond ship designing are:
The four design phases that map across to the previous VD2221 method and many others
The increase in exponential effort required for each following stage and aligns with the earlier discussion about the lengthy refinement phase.
Pahl & Beitz Engineering Design: A Systematic Approach
Prescriptive stage-based models promote the idea that following a structured and systematic process will lead to a better result. For example, Pahl & Beitz state that following their steps (shown here) ensures that nothing essential is overlooked, leading to more accurate scheduling and resulting in design solutions which may be more easily reused.
Although (or because) they are popular, all these models have also attracted critique, they do not suit every situation. Sometimes the more precise they try to be the more holes people find, patching the holes can make the model unwieldy and unsuited to more simple problems. For example, many models emphasise an original design cascading down from the stakeholder needs. However real-world projects often place strong limitations on the early concept design, with constraints such as existing product platforms and legislative requirements often predetermining the form of the solution. Whilst not explicitly stated in many otherwise thorough models, these constraints must be considered in the early stages of the process so that they are either complied with or an alternative approach worked on.
Stage-Gates
How to reduce risk in large uncertain projects.
Robert Cooper’s Stage Gate Models have been almost universally accepted as the framework for development in large companies. It’s become the gold standard for managing risk in large organisations, and thus is an essential model to know.
By creating “gates” between discreet portions of work, the activity should not be able to spill on and on unchecked. At each gate, the project is reviewed and permission is either given or denied for you to continue.
The simplest analogy to the method is like a game of poker.
At the start every player is given 2 cards and the aim is to make the best set of 5, but at the moment you only have 2. In a professional game, players would bet money on these 2 cards. Now do you bet everything you have? No, you only have some of the information. So you wait till the next card is revealed, and then you bet more or pull out. Again another card is revealed and you bet a little more or pull out.
Eventually all the cards are revealed and you have all the information you need in front of you to make a decision whether it’s worth going all the way or pulling out.
So just like a product development process, you don’t know everything at the start and slowly over time you commit more resources as the complete picture forms.
Double Diamond
In all creative processes a number of possible ideas are created (‘divergent thinking’) before refining and narrowing down to the best idea (‘convergent thinking’), and this can be represented by a diamond shape. But the Double Diamond indicates that this happens twice – once to confirm the problem definition and once to create the solution.
One of the greatest mistakes is to omit the left hand diamond and end up solving the wrong problem.
Created by the Design Council in 2005 to help illustrate a common design process, the Double Diamond is divided into four distinct phases – Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver.
1 Discover
The first quarter of the Double Diamond model covers the start of the project. Designers try to look at the world in a fresh way, notice new things and gather insights.
2 Define
The second quarter represents the definition stage, in which designers try to make sense of all the possibilities identified in the Discover phase. Which matters most? Which should we act on first? What is feasible? The goal here is to develop a clear creative brief that frames the fundamental design challenge.
3 Develop
The third quarter marks a period of development where solutions or concepts are created, prototyped, tested and iterated. This process of trial and error helps designers to improve and refine their ideas.
4 Delivery
The final quarter of the double diamond model is the delivery stage, where the resulting project (a product, service or environment, for example) is finalised, produced and launched.
“It’s not ‘us versus them’ or even ‘us on behalf of them.’ For a design thinker it has to be ‘us with them’”
Design Thinking
A nice simple approach, but maybe a little ‘too light’ for engineers.
A currently very popular problem-solving approach, made famous by the design firm IDEO and Stanford University, and countless problem-solving consultants. It is interesting from other methods in that it leads with an ‘Empathy’ stage as the starting step, understanding your audience / customer / user (much like the double diamond) and then iterating through design, prototyping and testing.
Sadly it’s become more of a business buzzword today much like the use of the word Brainstorm to mean ‘think’ and doesn’t have the rigour of a detailed engineering design development process. But “horses for courses”, as the saying goes, pick the right tool for the job you’re facing.
What I find exciting is this tool’s success outside of traditional engineering and design applications. This is where I believe its strengths lie, helping non-engineers and designers tackle problems creatively. Doctors, lawyers, teachers etc… anyone who hasn’t spent years at university studying project development.