I’ve always had a slight obsession with whiteboards. So much so that when I came back from the University Innovation Fellows Silicon Valley Meet-up in November of 2017, I started drawing up designs for a whiteboard wall (despite the fact that my husband and I occupied a 650 square-foot studio apartment). I settled on a large panel of whiteboard from the Menard’s that could be moved with me around the space and tucked away when necessary. A panel has carried me through many ideation and project planning sessions since.
I think my obsession with the whiteboards is, in part, an obsession with making. Particularly, the magic of turning nothing into something. A whiteboard is just that, a white board, until you put a pen to it. And once you have a pen (and an eraser), an infinite canvas awaits.
A key stage of the design thinking process, as used by the Stanford d.school, is prototyping. After you have immersed yourself in the experience of your user (empathize), defined your problem/challenge/need (define), and generated possible solutions (ideate), you begin building the ideas you’ve conceived. Prototyping is centered in a mindset of failing fast in order to learn quickly and is highly iterative. You might even introduce prototyping early in the design process, having people creating with their hands as they ideate with various office supply or crafting tools. Like this cart…
At a recent meeting I left people pondering this question: what can you learn from the quick and dirty version? And really, this question is about prototyping. The value in this inquiry is getting to the real art form of prototyping–using each iteration as an opportunity to test an assumption, to put the idea into context and learn something from it.
So, what have you been procrastinating on building, making, or creating? Have you been hung up on doing it the “right” way or making sure it’s “good enough”? Stop that! Unleash your creativity and let yourself play. Discover what the quick and dirty version would be and go do it! Learn from that and do it again!