tiny gigantic

There’s a lot to be said for scrapping your action plan and just making things using intuition and passion as your guide. Some call this rapid prototyping. We call it makin’ shit. The idea is to commit to a high pace of creation and make your decisions on the fly (not ahead of time). When you eliminate the boundaries set by your client, your boss, your inner critic or your preconceptions, you make room for unknowns, some of which could be monumentally valuable.

“We make a lot of this stuff up as we go along,” the lead designer said. Everyone in the group laughed until he continued, “I’m serious. We don’t assume anything works and we don’t like to make predictions without real-world tests. Predictions color our thinking. So, we continually make this up as we go along, keeping what works and throwing away what doesn’t. We’ve found that about 90% of it doesn’t work.

That’s from an article about the web designers at Netflix. I quoted it because I want you to know that one of the most successful websites in the world gets designed by the seat of its pants. It gets designed by taking chances, not by making plans.

Sure, this approach is a little scary. It comes with more failure and more uncertainty about outcomes. So you gotta be okay with that. It comes with the extra burden of getting the people who are stuck in old ways of thinking and doing to trust the process. And this, my friends, requires a ton of patience.

But it works. And it’s super fuckin fun. It prioritizes those moments of pure creative play. It focuses you on the making of the thing before the thing itself. And isn’t that why you got into the business of creativity in the first place?

04/06/07 by josh kamler

This entry was posted on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 10:12 am and is filed under Thinking, Toolbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.