Design Thinking Sketching
Sometimes I just like to sketch what I am feeling or sketch a problem I am working on. I don’t try to make it a metaphor or diagram or anything like that. I try to NOT make it any sort of person or animal or recognizable physical object. Then I sit back and look at it and see what I can see.
The goal is to see and think using my visual, perceptual mode rather than my analytic mode. Sometimes I get great insights, sometimes not. But it doesn’t take much time and the upside is it can be quite helpful.
This for me is a kind of Design Thinking, it is about learning how to make a mental shift in how we see the world and it’s underlying patterns, both problems and opportunities.
I have been having such a great time recently on a new product we are working on that I haven’t been able to stay asleep. I wake up and need to work on it some more. So, I thought at that and out came this. I called it “DennisOnFire.”
When I am looking at it, trying to figure it out I often turn the drawing around. Rotating it and seeing if it makes a difference, if a different understanding comes to mind. In the way you see the image now it reminds me of fire. But upside down it reminds me of roots, reaching down into fertile earth. On the one side I start to think of wind blowing around, a large gust after large gust. On the other side I see a grasping extension into the darkness, a trying to extract from nothingness a something.
Tags: Design Thinking, Pattern Recognition, Perceptual Mode, Problem Solving, Sketch