Activeside of design

basically you're right. but you're mixing up different things. chaos is something that has several definitions. for a mathematician it is something different like for a physitist and something different for a designer. but for all chaos has no order. complexity always has an order, although it's hard to understand. finding the underlying patterns is nothing else than to do your job as a creative. creativity is always a play with systems and modules. if there are not enough modules in a system you can't be creative. so simplicity derives from complexity if you have understood a problem. like steve jobs said. what you're talking about is finding of problem solving strategies, and there are an awfull lot of them.

Thank you so much for sharing this.

this is a very good read. thanks for sharing.

this is a good article.

Wow. This is a very good reading.

I will adapt this method right away in my next design. Can't wait to see how it turned out.

This week, I collaborated for the first time with new colleagues on a new project. It's a very large project for a financial institution in France, involving marketing, social media, information architecture and design, mobile interfaces, customers services, etc. The size of the project is (almost) overwhelming.

So, a couple of days ago the team decided to work together for a couple hours in order to build for ourselves a better understanding of this multidimensional project. My first thinking was that we needed large paper boards and a series of good thick color pens for this kind of exercise (if you're used to Design Thinking methodology, you know that working on walls is key). But when I got into the meeting rooms, my colleagues (project managers and client director) were all sitting facing their laptops… ;-) !! And their first reflex was very typical of the PowerPoint Thinking : "So, what are the different categories of subjects we will have to manage. Can we first come up with 4 or 5 categories ?" (it's incredible how PPT can damage our fellow workers' brains…;-)

This is exactly what you DON'T want to do : looking for organization first.

I didn't say anything and started to install a series of 4 large paper boards on the wall in order to create a large working area in the room. And then, I started to write down (with large and legible characters) whatever subject came to my mind about this project, and invite my colleagues to do the same. First, they were a bit reluctant but I didn't pay attention to their mood and just continued writing down subjects as it went. They were soon caught in the fun of generating ideas about the project : "and add this, and add that, and what about this one…!". Of course, in about 20 mn we came up with a huge list and everyone agreed on the fact that it was probably 95% exhaustive.

And that's the key, when you work on a list, it HAS TO BE exhaustive, otherwise it loose all its value.

The list was a chaos but it didn't took long to find similarities, groups, differences, so we could see the organization emerging from the chaos. The whole thing took us about 1h30. Simple, hun ?