Why you are not a number
You have done three straight weeks of regular exercise, closed all your rings on your Apple Watch fitness app every day, and you feel great. Out of the blue, you hurt your ankle while walking down some stairs. It feels okay at first but then it starts to swell.
Three days later, you are still putting ice packs on your ankle and the whole time, your Apple Watch is constantly reminding you to get up because you are “nearly there!”
Your streak is gone because you’re hurt. Yet the watch and most fitness apps have no sense of this. You are not a machine that can just be fixed in an hour by a technician; you are a human with a complex nervous system that needs time to recover.
The more we look at the metrics of what we’re doing, the less we look at why we are doing it. The temptation is to do something you can quantify because numbers are easy to understand and give you a sense of progress. Yet, as in our little drama above, numbers are easily affected by circumstance.
So what are we to do?
Leave numbers and metrics to what they are best at doing: measuring business activity, and operations that do run like machines. If one person gets sick, an entire company doesn’t shut down, it carries on because, like any machine, it can be fixed.
On the other hand, Individuals and communities are not machines. They thrive on a sense of purpose. They need a structure, not a number. Creative frameworks are structures that allow us to make progress without measurement. The joy and the value come from the consistent challenge and curiosity that these structures enable.
Here is a collection of articles I have written about creative frameworks that focus on the process, not the outcome, the structure, not the number.
The journey is to be enjoyed but before you can take it, you need to find out where you are right now, which is a journey in itself.
Move from a fixed to a growth mindset, and the possibilities are endless.
Think about your life and education. Were you ever taught how to be creative?
Focusing on a user’s intent allows you as a designer to look into the future and predict what the user will need and when.
What is a creative framework?
At its simplest, it is a conceptual tool that allows you to test a concept.
“The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.”
- Bertrand Russell
