Are you directing or acting?
“Cut! Let’s try that one more time!”
You’re on a movie set, and the director didn’t see exactly what they were looking for in a particular take. The lighting was off, the costumes looked wrong, or the expressions on the actors’ faces didn’t match the dialogue. Directors like David Fincher are famous for doing forty or fifty takes to get what they want. Everybody involved takes this process in their stride because they expect this to happen; they just set up and try again. This might seem like a super annoying—or incredibly inefficient—way to work. But this seemingly slow method can lead to great results for creative work.
Doing multiple takes while everything is set up and everyone is in the right frame of mind is, in fact, very efficient and creative.
Let's take another scenario. Let's say a designer spends some time creating a poster for a design team review. They present a couple of ideas, but something is not quite right. The structure is wrong, or the content does not quite work. What happens next? The people trying to decide if the design makes sense (the “directors”) cannot say, “Okay, let's try it again” in real time because the designer cannot just make another idea for the poster on the spot. It takes another 2-3 days to make a meaningful version, which, once again, might not be quite right.
Suddenly, it’s our standard process for designing that looks pretty inefficient and emotionally bruising compared to the film process of repeatedly trying.
To avoid this situation, a lone designer will often try to both act out the scene (create a design) and direct the scene (decide which of their ideas is the right one to show). But this is difficult. I know there have been a few actor/directors, but I would say that they are the exception, not the rule.
In films, the audience never sees all the takes, just the final cut; in design, a client or internal stakeholders only need to see two or three versions of a design, but a design team’s internal process needs to be much more expansive to come up with those few strong ideas.
If you are designing something, you are an actor. So, don’t edit yourself. Come into an internal team design review with a range of different concepts. This is where it’s helpful to think in concept models. What is a concept model? For example, cars, trains, and bicycles are different concept models of transport that can get you from A to B. They require very different elements to make them work. Cars require roads, insurance, driver’s licenses etc. Trains need stations, tickets, timetables etc. They each provide the same outcome of getting from A to B but go about it in very different ways. Their concept models are clearly different.
One simple rule for crafting different concept models of an idea is to take your first idea and then make the complete opposite version. (Car vs. Train) Another method is to take your initial model and then take everything out of it apart from the essential elements (Car vs. Bicycle).
Finding the right concept model is the hard work of design. Once the concept model is transparent, creating the sketch or image of the design is usually pretty fast. Bring a variety of concept models to your “director”—now they can see a breadth of options, leading to better outcomes and a much richer conversation about the problem you are trying to solve.
If you are a design director, then you are like the film director; you cannot be involved with creating individual concept models/ideas. It’s not impossible of course, but you do have to flick a switch in your brain and let go of any attachment you have to an idea and look at it as if you were seeing it for the first time. This sounds logically possible, yet it’s often emotionally very difficult to do; the effort it takes to make something makes it hard to let go of, clouding your ability to understand the problem and see the right solution.
I can hear the outcry from designers now: “Why can’t we do both?”
I would reply there is no harm in being an actor. Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, and Angela Bassett … are all great actors; they have considerable influence over the creative process, but they don’t edit and direct the final movie. They play their part. A considerable part, and they seem very happy with that role.
Design is the ability to make sense of things. It is often a collaborative activity, and even the “crazy ones” have their own creative collaborators. Brain Eno, famous for his creativity, has a term for this. He calls it scenius, his term which describes “the creative intelligence of a community.” In these collaborations, we all have a role. Sometimes those roles are interchangeable, but great ideas are often formed when people focus on a single role, allowing the design process to work and creating something beyond a single imagination.
