Ideas communication: Diagram and doodling

According to Hideshi Hamaguchi, the Japanese engineer and inventor of the USB Stick, if you don’t have the talent for drawing but are good at strategic thinking, then you can still become a great product designer. All you have to do is connect the design to the strategy and then turn into a language the company management people and the consumer can understand. To keep creativity on the top and communicate the design, Hamaguchi intentionally uses both diagram and doodling to bridge logical and intuitive thinking. Source: http://www.yankodesign.com)

Non-designer designers

"The glossy, black and metal slab [of the iPhone] came about because Jobs had acquired great design taste, even though he wasn’t really a designer. Or was he? That depends on the definition we use. Jobs wasn’t a designer, because he didn’t have a degree in any design field. In his professional life, he didn’t directly engage in the kind of creative work that we usually associate with professional designers. Yet you needn’t have designer credentials to think and act as a designer. Jobs exemplified many of the traits of a great designer: He was creative, curious, exploratory, and playful. His father had taught him that it was important to care about the craft of anything you built. Influenced by Zen philosophy, Jobs paid close attention to the world around him and came to appreciate the kind of simple, refined aesthetic." John Edson

Love of ideas

"Just as Steve (Jobs) loved ideas, and loved making stuff, he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence. You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished." Jonathan Ive

Learning how to draw: iPad, or pen & paper

In the early stages of learning how to drive a car, the learner with a manual gear box tends to look at the gear lever when changing gear. In contrast, the learner with an automatic gear box can focus immediately on the overall task: driving. Now, and using the driving analogy, do novice designers when learning how to draw with pen and paper resemble the learner with the manual gear box, struggling with technique (using aids such as rulers)? Whereas the novice with an iPad is up there with the learner using the automatic gear box, immediately focusing on the overall task: drawing?

A2Z ≠ A2B

Ideators make room for a lot of spontaneity and flexibility in their everyday life. They experience sudden insights, make discoveries, and come up with fresh solutions to old problems. They seek alternatives to the usual routine way of doing things.

Letting go

Circumstances are always shifting and changing in the realm of design ideas. You may feel the need to return once again to a previous condition, just to see if things might have changed. If they have not, let go of the idea and leave in good conscience.

Timely effort

"It's not just effort that makes it possible for a new product to be a massive hit. It also has to be timely and technology should be ready to make a certain design a reality." Lee Minhyouk, vice president for design at Samsung Mobile, admitting in an interview with Reuters that his work does not yet match the work of Apple's Jonathan Ive.