When you solve a problem, you have two main approaches to follow: top-down and bottom-up. Combining them empowers designers to generate novel and useful solutions that are often not achievable with linear thinking.
Top-down is the direct, forward-looking approach
The top-down approach to problem-solving is the most immediate way to initiate. Designers establish goals, identify constraints, execute research, test prototypes, and implement possible solutions to test in the application field.
Sometimes there is not enough time and resources to explore the problem. Suppose we don’t define the problem we’re trying to solve in the best way possible by identifying its domain, boundaries, and relationships. In that case, we have fewer opportunities to find successful and innovative solutions.
Bottom-up is the boundaryless exploration
When we dedicate focused, structured activities to explore different aspects of the problem and generate ideas for possible solutions, we’re building opportunities for innovation from the bottom-up.
Designers need to go beyond thinking in the familiar, direct, and rational way in the discovery and ideation phase. There are many structured methods to facilitate creativity and imagination. And facilitated collaborative thinking allows us to beyond the obvious and superficial solutions by pushing us to visualize possible better scenarios.
The bottom-up approach facilitates discovering alternative and innovative solutions not readily available when constrained in the traditional, linear thinking method.
Combine bottom-up with top-down problem-solving to find better solutions
Use the creative tension between intention and uncertainty to build unthinkable solutions.
Everyday problem-solvers as designers can reap the benefits of a combined top-down and bottom-up approach to find novel and useful solutions.
Being always in the flow could be exhausting, both physically and creatively. Take periodic breaks to reflect on your path, and be prepared to lay out a new road. You cannot use a network when you need it. To have it tomorrow you need to prepare it today.
I feel like I have nothing to write about because of the calendar. Christmas Eve, you’re not supposed to be working unless you have to. The pressure is lower. You think about the year turning to an end. And what a year.
When I took the latest challenge about publishing every day for a month, I had a specific goal, the intention to tell the lessons learned while writing privately for a year. I kept on writing until today for an extra week. Still, I felt the inertia of the substantial direction: “writing about writing,” and I was so in a good pace that any topic distracting me from that focus almost annoyed me.
So I am asking myself, am I writing about writing forever?
I don’t think so.
Writing is a medium, a means to an end. It helps to clarify my thinking, and that is the best benefit I’ve got so far. But am I going with the flow every day? I am quite tired of improvising and rushing the daily article “because I have to do it”. It’s still a good exercise, don’t get me wrong, and I am proud of my habit. But I want more.
I want to create bricks to stack into buildings. The atomic essays were perfectly fitting this goal: one topic, one page with one repeatable format plus one abstract, iconic illustration. I discovered a great formula that I wasn’t looking for.
But now, I don’t feel like keeping on writing about writing. I have other areas to explore. For instance: design and all its applications; education, teaching, learning; mentoring, coaching, and facilitation. On top of all of them, I always stumble upon Systems Thinking and Critical Thinking with a few trips down the Scientific Thinking road.
So, what am I missing? Why today’s “atomic essay” is not flowing?
Because today, it’s reflection day.
Today I am finally stopping for a moment and reflecting on my current path. A lot changed; a lot I have changed. If I want to be intentional, I need to do reflections like these and, since I have this new custom, I like to do it aloud, here, in public.
What’s going to happen tomorrow is the question I need to ask myself today.
What’s the prompt that will inspire me for the next atomic essay?
See you tomorrow, then.
You cannot always be in the flow. Take periodic breaks to evaluate your achievements in retrospective to plan the next move.
Design is easy if you know how to do it, Bruno Munari used to say.
Too often, I hear somebody talking to me about design as something strictly related to the visual appearance of things. While color, texture, shape, form, volume, configuration, layout, typography, and many other visual qualities are a matter of design, we should clarify that we are talking about Visual Design or Graphic Design.
There’s a more comprehensive, high-level, and maybe even purist definition of design that we need to consider: design is a process to build something. Design aims to be systematic and systemic in putting something in the world that can solve a problem or mitigate it.
Isn’t an illustration or a book layout a design problem? Of course, it is! But it is a part of a bigger problem, called: communication. Some designers argue that beauty is a vital part of design and that it should be the first goal of a designer to create something beautiful.
That is why design should not be improvised. There are steps in the design process involving creativity, imagination, fantasy, diverging with our creative minds to visualize parts of the problem, and possible ways to solve it. But it’s just a part of it.
While art exists to raise questions and create problems, design, in its purest form, should live to find answers (or better questions) and to solve problems (or find better ones).
If you don’t want to reinvent the Universe from scratch and waste your life doing the same errors and discoveries that others already did, study, research, and adapt the best design process for the context of the problem you want to solve. And design solutions that are effective, efficient, and pleasurable.
Follow a design method to build solutions that are effective, efficient, and pleasurable. You might risk winning the “Compasso d’Oro.”
Set the creative constraints to write no more than 250 words. Or 500 words. Or to write for at least 30 minutes and no more than one hour.
Define the template for your article. Think about the usual storytelling format: introduction (stating the context), development (raising attention on one issue, proposing solutions), conclusion (wrapping up with observations).
While I’ve rejected the screenshot format because highly inaccessible and unusable, I come up with a three-parts (plus the title) format that I’ve immediately found workable:
Clear and concise title giving a direct direction
Introduction. The writing challenge’s broader context and one sentence summarizing the issue as if it were a subtitle.
Development. Treatment of the topic with a logical and incremental progression in supporting the initial statement. Sometimes it’s a short story, and others are a list of examples, evidence, or applications.
Conclusion. Further reinforcement of the initial statement, reworded with an effort to build a punch line closing in a crescendo.
Having a format to follow, even when flexible and loose, gives the quick sprint of taking care of the topic without worrying about the structure. It gives pace and logical flow. When you get fluid with the format, you can become very efficient in writing 200-300 words in less than 30 minutes.
And when you look at what you wrote in that nicely formatted article, with exact steps in your narration, going from a punchy title, an immersive introduction, an engaging development to an impactful conclusion, you feel good.
Relationships between parts let emerge formal beauty out of simple rules.
Don’t’ wait for users to find holes in your solutions. Prepare testing cases covering notable usage scenarios and stress hard your designs to see if they hold in the most challenging conditions.
As a designer and a maker, you find solutions to problems. Your designs need to be effective, efficient, and pleasurable. You put something in the world which solves a problem already existing, or a new one emerged. You work hard to research how people live and experience these problems or perceive unique needs and wants until you express your creativity in creating novel and meaningful solutions. After verifying the product’s feasibility or service satisfying the requirements you identified, you’ll need to test how they provide a valid answer to the initial quest you’ve started.
Does it work? Good.
Do you want to waste all of those resources involved in long iterations with user research, brainstorming, ideating, prototyping and testing, by realizing a solution that won’t hold in extreme contexts, not contemplated in your initial design brief?
That is the moment to stress your solution:
Will it work in extreme cases?
What if the user’s behavior is not within the boundaries initially considered?
What if the material or the infrastructure needed to sustain a pressure close to their limits?
What is the maximum stress that the solution can hold before breaking?
What if the solution is used in a different context than the one planned?
Is the technology required ready, mature, and sufficiently flexible to cover all extreme usage cases?
The design process requires competence, focus, and hard work. Do not risk to create fragile solutions by skipping systematic testing of your designs. Plan and execute to stress your solutions intentionally in extreme cases. You will develop robust tools with a higher chance of surviving in the real world.
If you test as many extreme cases as possible you create more robust designs.
The habit of building habits. You choose to be who you are by repeatedly doing what you decide to do, consistently, continuously.
Not happy I kept on writing these:
Be prepared for anything. It doesn’t matter if you can foresee the future, be mindful in preparing yourself always beyond the expected, to be ready for the unknowable.
As a further reflection on my daily writing habit I wrote this:
Writing about writing about writing. Write daily: a lot, a little, but write. Write free-flowing or with intentions, but write. Collect, organize, and connect, but write. Review, revise, and publish, but write!
I am happy and proud and now looking forward to the next challenge.
I achieved my challenge of writing 30 Atomic Essays in 30 days, and I cannot stop. I am continuing to cultivate my daily writing habit. Why? How? What did I learn?
Thanks to @MG1896 on fs.blog community for asking me inspiring questions about my challenge in building a daily writing habit. They sparked the reflections in this article.
The time to write: fixed or opportunistic?
When you wrote, was it always in the morning as a habit, or did you vary at times?
Like many others, I have a busy life. Although it’s smarter and more comfortable setting the same time to perform a habit (it solidifies it and makes it a ritual), it’s not always possible to do it always at the same time.
Check the box daily. Wrote today? Yes!
The most pressing motivation was the need to check the box for the day. The constant thought of “I need to write, I need to write, I need to write” is not always positive, but it is useful. After the first 4-8 weeks, it is so ingrained in your day that you know, no matter what, at any time, in any way possible, you must write those 500 words. So, while I had a daily reminder at 07:00 am every day of the year, I moved and postponed that reminder several times during the day with no exceptions. Unfortunately, that is adding stress to the daily schedule, and it forces you to juggle with another item to make the magic. I would like to improve this aspect, when possible, it would be better to set a fixed time on the calendar and do it always at the same time. Morning or evening, it’s up to you, make some tests, and check the results. If I have learned anything from this, it was essential to measure actual effects on the field rather than living on approximations and speculations.
In 30 Atoms in 30 days, the schedule was tight. Again, It was impossible to plan a time to do it. Sometimes I wrote at night because I could not sleep. I must say I didn’t care. I liked to think that I must do it, and I was confident I would have done it. So, as soon as I can dive into my daily essay, I feel like I’ve reached my happy place. It is a great experience if I think how painful it was starting the first day on a blank page.
Writing free-flowing or with prompts? Why not both?
Transcribe your thoughts
When you start, you feel stuck, stupid, and empty. What the hell shall I write about? The beginning is very hard. So prompts are making a difference. It could be anything: what are you thinking about right now? What do you see? What did you do today? But, still, you feel stupid about doing it. Then, after many times you start, and you suffer, the magic happens. You feel like you must write something that you need to dump, to download from your brain. It doesn’t matter the style and the content. Writing is not anymore the goal. You must put it in words because it becomes a way to think. And so you realize that you “have been writing” your whole life. Since the day you were born.
“What did you think when you couldn’t talk,” I’ve asked once to a 4-years old kid, “That I wanted to talk,” she replied.
The trick is: transcribe your thoughts. That’s it. Nothing more than that. Difficult? Yeah. Sometimes senseless? Of course. Long and boring? You bet. Do it for 200 hours, and you’ll own the World.
Curate your thoughts
Thanks to half a million words I had in my dirty drafts, I went from “what the hell shall I write about?” to “How the hell shall I put an order in this monstrous mess?“. That became curation, then. And that is one of the best evolution you can do. To go from struggling to produce thoughts to curating your ideas. I cannot believe what I am about to say. It was easy! I had so much written down that I have to read, copy, and paste it into drafts and revise it. I was able to plan 30 essays from day zero. I had no shortage of ideas but rather the opposite. I have 100 ideas for articles, and I had “only” 30 slots to fill. Isn’t that amazing? That is why I participated in the 100-Twitter-Thread challenge.
1/This is my 100 thread for @threadapalooza – I am tweeting about 100 things that I've learned by writing every day for 365 days. Read more at: https://t.co/jZhyQJLhqw
How did you analyze/pick out the themes/patterns and then use them to inform yourself about your behaviors/tendencies etc.?
Trust the system and write freely but consistently. Reflection and synthesis can only come later, sometimes much later. My 500 drafts are untidy, messy, fragmented, incoherent. But when you put each of them organized, in each line of a boring spreadsheet, and you put a title summarizing its content, you start to see patterns. You should track your mood daily. You should highlight the key topics of each daily item to identify, precisely, themes and threads. If you want to have fun, you should use color-coding and zoomed-out, over-encompassing, synoptic views to explore the landscape of your mind. You will discover wonders, and you will ask yourself: is this me?
That’s precisely the process of identifying threads, topics, and themes with an effort to polish them and make them public. And it feels terrific!
Write daily: a lot, a little, but write. Write free-flowing or with intentions, but write. Collect, organize, and connect, but write. Review, revise, and publish, but write!
Raw shells on the shore, polished by the waves, fall into place, leaving a trace.
If you find yourself in the situation of not knowing what to write, you can leverage on your drafts, your notes, or your creative toolbox.
Why don’t you know what to write? Haven’t you been writing a free-flowing draft every day? No? That’s the first problem. If you build a habit of writing every day by transcribing your thoughts, you won’t have an ideas shortage. It’s easy and comfortable, and it’s packaged creativity. You don’t even have to think. Look into your draft archive or even your Zettelkasten, if you know what it is, and randomly pick one piece of writing.
Don’t you like it? Well, my friend, we’re here because you don’t know what to write. Don’t you think you’re pushing a bit too much? Trust the system. You’re cashing-in your investment, pick a draft, revise it, and publish it. That’s it.
Oh, I get it. You have no drafts in your archive. Well, that will require a bit of extra work, but we can fix it as well. So, go and pick the first creative prompt from your writing tools archive. What? Don’t you have such a thing? OK. So let’s create it now.
Ready?
Write ten questions in 60 seconds. Yeah, one minute, no second thoughts, no waiting, just set a timer and go!
What did you do today?
What caught your attention?
What’s the most fun thing somebody told you?
What did you dream last night?
What would you like to be in one year?
Who do you want to meet in 10 years?
Who changed your life, and you never told them?
If you had all the money in the world, what would you do?
What great mind of the past would you like to talk to?
What’s the last thought you want to think before you die?
Done? See? Was it easy?
OK, now let’s get back to the initial problems: we have no drafts in our archive and no creative prompts. What do you say? Do we have them? Oh, right! We just wrote the two things.
An article about what to write when you don’t have any ideas
An initial toolbox of creative writing prompts to jumpstart your drafts
Well, thank you for pointing me at those. So, what’s next? Nothing! We did it.
Congratulations, my friend. Come back again, any time!
You cannot declare yourself an expert because it’s a relative quality. Only somebody else could define you as an expert because of the problem you have solved for them and with them.
Being an expert is a relative position because there will always be somebody who knows more and better than you and somebody who knows less and worse than you.
At any moment in time, you are always an expert for somebody and a beginner for somebody else.
What to do with your expertise? Ask to whom sees you as an expert and have a dialogue with them. Don’t impose your help. Find, discover, define, and set the problem to see if it is desirable, useful, meaningful, and sustainable to solve that problem, and then offer your expertise to solve it.
This idea sparked thanks to the interesting Knowledge Entrepreneur Salon organized by Achim Rothe on Ness Labs Community.
It’s paywalled, this is an excerpt of a thread with Achim:
“There will always be people with more expertise than you, there will always be people with less expertise than you, it’s not for you to decide whether you are an expert.”
“And it is the job of a knowledge entrepreneur to show up with your particular expertise. So that your audience—people that do get value out of this—can find you”.
Achim Rothe
I totally subscribe to the notion of showing up to provide value to be recognized.
Practice, study, and be prepared to show up and provide value with your expertise. Welcome to the era of the Knowledge Entrepreneur.
Invest in your expertise and put it on a good service to become a Knowledge Entrepreneur
Reserve time in your calendar to be prepared. For what? For the obvious, for the expected, but most of all for the unexpected and the unexpectable.
If you prepare for the obvious, you’ll be doing the minimum required of you. You will satisfy the minimum requirement. It would already be a lot more than the average, but you won’t be able to demand hugs of gratitude for your exceptionality. It’s the recipe to pass unnoticed.
If you prepare for the expected, you will get the warm feeling of doing things right—you went just a bit over the qualifying threshold. You’re smart, but you don’t apply. You show the potential, but you prefer to devote your energies somewhere else.
If you prepare for the unexpected, you’ll conquer the famed extra mile. You’re not like the others. You care. You’re maybe a perfectionist. But of the right kind. You’re thoughtful and resourceful. You make a difference. You like to be celebrated and to surprise.
If you prepare for the unexpectable, you’ll just own the world. You have unlimited willpower. No defeat can stop you. The darkest dark is where you can find a lonely photon to shed light on infinity. You will change history. And maybe you will survive it.
It doesn’t matter if you can foresee, predict, or forecast the future, be mindful in preparing yourself always beyond the expected, and exercise your imagination to be ready for the unknowable. What could happen?
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