What many designer get wrong

• A simple guide to creativity
• Practicality: ♥ ♥ ♥ • •
• Theoretical: ♥ ♥ ♥ • •

Have you ever considered how creativity works? How do you come up with smart solutions and innovative ideas? Many consider creativity as something magical that just happens with little actual control. While others will find the need to enrich themselves with countless amounts of input and inspiration. And there are still others that think you need a blank canvas and just start. Almost all people feel like creativity needs some kind of freedom and that creativity cannot be forced, it just happens. 

But the answer lies in something that will feel very counterintuitive to many. Being creative and finding smart and innovative ideas has everything to do with accepting and acknowledging limitations in the creative process – and actually adding more limits rather than seeking freedom, creating more boundaries to your thoughts rather than seeking more inspiration.

More than a decade ago I gave a presentation to a select group of game industry people and students about this same topic. I used the notion of “Thinking outside the box” and I used this metaphor to better explain how creativity works.

I’m comparing this box to our minds. The box includes 2 distinct features namely the cardboard border and the content. The content of the box refers to all our ideas, thoughts and concepts that we may think of, while the border keeps this all together. It is really hard, if not nearly impossible, to think beyond these borders. Without borders, there would be no box and no limit to our thoughts. Without the box our thoughts would literally be infinite. So, where do these borders come from?

The cardboard borders of our mind are mainly defined by preconceptions, fuelled by experience and expectations. Our mind constantly associates things with other things; it’s constantly trying to find connections between different thoughts. This process is completely automatic and we have but limited control over this.

So let’s do a little thought experiment: Let’s say you are tasked to design a video game for home consoles with a target group of young males between the age of 8 and 12 years old and it had to be of the platforming genre. This will automatically set up borders in your mind with the four requirements I just mentioned. Let’s dissect what happens:

The words ‘video game’ splits the mind into 2 sections through every thought that is connected to video games and everything that is not. You might think about a screen, a desktop computer, an Atari 2600, etc. The same thing happens with the requirements ‘home console’, ‘8-12 year old male’ and possibly the strongest border in our requirements list is ‘platform game’. Genres -by their very definition- are a set of preconceptions, meant to describe a product of the same kind. So you are bound to think about jumping, collecting, character control, moving left to right and all other kinds of thoughts when you hear the words ‘platform game’.

Whenever we are thinking about anything our mind creates borders these borders, effectively boxing in your thought, hence the box metaphor. Now in everyday life this is extremely useful as it acts as a filter – a kind of search engine that helps us find and deal with related stuff very quickly. This box is in fact a comfort zone. But the problem is that these thoughts, ideas and concepts are superficial and incomplete and in most cases do not lead to the best design.

To combat this I use 2 techniques; making the Box smaller and creating a completely new Box. 

1. Making the box smaller

This process is started by our assignment already, it created our basic box. Doing some research will tighten the borders even further and some thoughts that are inside the Box may have to be dropped as research has proven them to be no longer valid. But the research has also made us more aware of the superficiality of the content, our thoughts, ideas and concept. We start to feel our borders and we are noticing that there isn’t really anything original inside our box. This feeling is uncomfortable and makes us doubt ourselves and if you are not careful could turn into the first step of designer block.

Our natural response is to expand the borders, to widen our view and to allow more thoughts in the box, allowing us to think about new ideas. So we add new ideas, and more new ideas and even more new ideas so we do not feel as restricted and we may even think that there are some creative new ideas in there. But it turns out that our box has become a big mess, a big pile of ideas with little correlation. In this messy pile it is hard to find anything.

So instead, we should not widen the box even if it seems so natural to do, but instead we should shrink the box, making it even smaller. And one of the ways to do this is to question the content, to question our preconceptions. To demonstrate this let’s go back to our thought experiment and take our platform game.

One of the many preconceptions I have about platform games, is that they always include a character that is controlled by the player. So what would happen if we question this and we do not control a character? One of the solutions to this challenge would be to control the world, not the character.  A classic example that does this brilliantly is LocoRoco, allowing us to control 1 big or many small creatures at once by turning the entire world, forcing the creatures into a direction while they roll to a side.

Another preconception of platform games is that the game is played with the standard controller, but what if we challenge this as well? What if we controlled the game with a pair of drums instead? We might end up with Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat…

This way of adding new borders by challenging the content of our box and thus by challenging our preconceptions creates a smaller and possibly differently shaped box and adds a lot of problems, because we can not find solutions within our preconceptions, within our comfort-zone. The secret is that these problems actually drive us, or better yet, force us to find solutions beyond the borders, beyond our comfort-zone. In this way, adding borders forces creativity.

2. Make a different Box

The other solution would be to drop the Box that we set-up earlier and start with a completely new focus point. This new focus point can be anything. It could be game related, such as game mechanics, or it could be far removed from the comfort-zone, such as emotions for example.

Focusing on a completely new box frees the mind of its old borders and may provide a completely new perspective on the old box. Focusing on something that feels unrelated (such as our new box) helps you look at your old box with new eyes.

For example; a focus on time control could lead to a game as Braid, which in essence is still a platform game, but this idea would not occur in our old box, as it includes a new perspective. The old box was full of preconceptions about what a platform game would be, but it would not include stuff as time control. By focusing on time control first and by investigating what it means to be able to affect time sheds a new light on how it might affect the rest of our platform game.

But, I hear you thinking, isn’t this adding new ideas into our box,  expanding it, like we naturally tend to do, but shouldn’t? Yes it could have been part of our expanding Box, but we wouldn’t be able to assess the value and potential of that idea because it was simply one of many that we added. Because there was no focus – we simply added a bunch of ideas, it wouldn’t steer and guide us in the right direction. Instead of one of many, it becomes your guiding star providing us with a new perspective instead of a tagged on feature.

Focusing on something new, and investigating it in isolation and then returning to your old box and then seeing how you can make it fit will again, will force you to be creative. The further you are from your comfort-zone, the more the new perspective will provide you with new insight and innovative ideas.

These 2 ideas, shrinking the box or starting with a new box, really help creative processes. But it isn’t easy. It requires abandoning your comfort-zone, which takes courage, faith and determination.

You’ll need to abandon your comfort-zone with both techniques; shrinking the Box forces you to leave the Box while with the new Box it is a starting point. It takes courage and faith to believe in the fact that you can come up with solutions to problems that you have created by adding limits or by starting at a completely new starting point. It is all too easy to dismiss the borders you have created because the problems they create are seemingly too hard to find solutions for. It takes determination to hold on, and faith in your own creativity, believing in your power to overcome these problems and being able to innovate.