Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways
Sarah Stein Greenberg
304 pages, Ten Speed Press, 2021
Stanford designer and educator Thomas Both once said to me, “The job of a designer is to develop and drive forward an ambitious vision for the future and to obsess over every small detail along the way.”
Of course, this is nearly impossible. You almost never feel like you’re doing both perfectly well at the same time. But at the Stanford d.school, we help people consciously shift between different modes; tackling one piece at a time. In any design project, there are times when you expand the number of ideas you’re working with, and times when you converge on just a few to keep developing. Moments to invoke your bias toward action, and moments to slow down and reflect. Phases to plan the path toward immediate impact, and others to envision the long-term effects of what you’re creating with care and consideration for how that might ripple in the world. We call this constant toggling back and forth by a range of names, including “designing your design work,” or “being mindful of process.” And this meta-skill becomes indispensable in taking control of your own creative process, as well as bringing others along in creative collaborations.
Throughout these shifts, you make countless decisions. Whose needs are you designing for? What skills does your team require? Which prototypes are going to keep refining? When is your solution ready to launch? In design work, most of those decisions are judgment calls. There aren’t easy or obvious right answers when creativity or innovation is involved. You must navigate a lot of ambiguity.
One of the most practical ways to handle uncertainty is to get good at putting your work out there and getting lots of input and feedback; not just once, but throughout your creative process. This has the double benefit of making your work better and honing your judgment about what makes your work good or not.
In my new book, Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways, I highlight a range of assignments and methods we teach at the d.school that help you do precisely this. One of these, “Units of Energy Critique,” which was created by Perry Klebahn, Jeremy Utley, and Kathryn Segovia, is featured below in its entirety. It is a playful, thoughtful practice that will help you to strengthen the feedback and judgment muscle in yourself, your team, and your organization.—Sarah Stein Greenberg
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Judgment is a vital yet frequently misused capacity when it comes to creative work. It’s often applied too early in a creative process, which cuts off great potential ideas before they can bloom, or too late, which results in subpar or even harmful work getting out into the world.
You are already skilled at a kind of blunt-force judgment; rapidly evaluating a situation or experience for threats or opportunity is hard-wired into your brain to keep you safe. This assignment helps you take advantage of your instinct to judge and channels it into a productive form for creative work called “critique.”
How do you make your judgments more deliberate? Most people have strong instincts or feelings about what constitutes “good” when it comes to design, but they don’t take time to think about what “good” actually means. When you react to work and judge yourself or others based on hidden criteria that you have not exposed or defined, you’re more likely to make idiosyncratic or biased decisions. Part of being deliberate in this case is sharpening your definition of good, which helps you hold yourself and others to a high standard of work.
Engaging in critique means you periodically take an active stance of evaluation for the purpose of improving the work. Critique should happen not just once, but at specific moments throughout any creative process. (This also means critique should not happen all the time.) Knowing that you have set aside a specific time and approach for critique frees you up to have an exploratory, nonjudgmental mindset at other times. This method is the essential component to working in an iterative way: each time you pause to critique, you start a new cycle and take your work not just to the next part of your process, but also to a higher level.
This assignment is a playful approach to critique. You can use it on your own to reflect and calibrate your work, but since any definition of “good” work needs to be viewed through many different lenses to hold water in our diverse society, your work and the impact you want to achieve are more likely to improve if you critique with a group of people who provide a range of perspectives.
At different stages in your creative process this assignment offers different benefits. If you use it early on when you’re still gathering inspiration for your work, it will help you to build a set of design principles toward which to aim your own project. Later on, when you (or your team) have produced a set of items to compare to each other (early-stage ideas, fleshed-out concepts, prototypes, or any other comparable output), it helps you to refine your solutions.
First, everyone in the critique group needs to bring something for feedback. Or you need to have multiple things to share with the group. For example, perhaps everyone produced a statement of direction for a given project or created initial concept sketches showing what they might build into early prototypes and then test. You’ll be able to use the variation across a similar set to help the group figure out what “good” looks like.
Post images (or the work itself) up on a wall. Identify each with a number on a sticky note.
To set the tone for the critique, say, “Imagine that everyone else here is from Mars, where there’s no ownership of individual work, no authorship, no attribution. We’re all trying to understand what constitutes spectacular design in order to advance our own work.” This playful frame helps you get personal egos out of the way and encourages everyone to view the work objectively, rather than as an extension of self. The make-believe really helps, as does the effect of seeing your own work alongside everyone else’s.
Ask everyone to use their internal sense of enthusiasm as an initial indicator of quality for the work being critiqued. You might say any of the following:
- When you see a particular direction of problem statement or concept, how enthusiastic do you feel about it?
- If you could jump in and help with any of these, which ones would you actually devote your own energy to?
- Which one of these do you wish you had come up with?
Ultimately, you’re trying to discern which of the projects transfer a sense of purpose and meaning to you. These are not traditional criteria, but they work well to help you cut straight to your instinctive judgment.
Give everyone a sticky note and explain that it represents a unit of energy. Write your initials on yours, along with the number of the work that energizes you the most, and ask everyone else to do the same. After all, you’re an independent, autonomous Martian licensed to work on whatever these humans have made! This is very different from how people work most of the time, where you may have to just put your head down and slog through what-ever project has been assigned to you. As a side benefit, placing your units of energy with the work that you resonate with most helps you uncover more about what really moves you, which you can later apply to your own work.
To avoid group-think, where a popular choice gains momentum and attracts all the units of energy, ask everyone to post their sticky notes next to their project of choice at the same time. Then step back and observe. You’ve made a heat map. You can see where the group’s collective energy lies: it’s right in front of you.
Pause to ask the group to reflect and start a critical discussion. There are usually some clear favorites that get most of the energy. But this isn’t voting: the whole point is to ask and understand why people responded favorably to what they selected.
Start with one that hasn’t gotten many units. Explore it publicly. Say, “Clearly this one is lacking something. I’m not saying that whoever made it is bad; I’m saying it’s a poorly constructed piece of work, and whoever made it—and by the way, we don’t need to know, so please don’t say it—there are a couple of changes you can make to improve it.” This is a point-in-time measurement; it’s not an indictment of the designer, but it is a criticism of the particular artifact you’re evaluating. This kind of statement makes the critique feel purposeful; you’re having a hard conversation now because the information will generate better work. This is the embodiment of the principle “hard on work, soft on people.” Be sure to ask the one or two people who did like this work, “Why was this one energizing to you?” Usually there’s something they picked up on that turns out to be an interesting design principle or criterion. Maybe that person has a unique lens because of their background. Now you have a chance to discuss a good thing you might have missed without that one person’s observation, as well as what the piece is lacking.
For the projects that have gotten more units of energy, find out why that is. Ask someone who liked the work to explain, and then ask if anyone liked it for an entirely different reason. Maybe that work did one thing well, or perhaps it has a range of positives. Another benefit of the structure of this assignment is that since everyone has an equal number of units of energy to deploy, you know that everyone has an opinion you can bring out. You’re less likely to develop criteria that are informed only by a few loud voices dominating the conversation.
Use what is and what isn’t working about each piece to create a running list of what would make something a great piece of work in this particular context. For example, let’s say you’re sharing ideas about how to make the airport security process more streamlined. A concept might be critiqued because it would work for only one type of traveler. As a result, your group might decide that one principle of the desired solution is that it needs to handle everyone from families to business people to folks with limited mobility. Or you could define a different principle—that every type of traveler should feel like they have a customized experience—and set about trying to figure out what solutions would make that possible. After each piece of work has been critiqued, look at this running list and refine it. Ultimately, you want to end up with four or five principles that everyone can use to fuel the next round of iterations.
Over the duration of a project, your criteria will evolve and you can keep building on them. At the beginning, you might have been focused on the basics, like:
- Does this accomplish a critical function?
- Is it clear what this does?
- Is this easy to use?
Later on, your group should ask bigger-picture questions:
- How will this really help people?
- Who might be excluded from using this?
- Will this create any negative environmental consequences, like waste?
- Are there any other social impacts?
When you design, you’re responsible for both the intended and unintended impacts of what you put into the world. Infusing your critique with a broader lens during the later stages of your work helps you make sure that your work is living up to your definition of quality on behalf of both others and yourself.
This style of critique is an honest assessment format. In any kind of creative work, you need a way to learn that quality really matters, that there is such a thing as bad work and good work, that those terms are highly subjective, and that you need lots of input from different people. In addition to building a set of principles, each person walks away with concrete, actionable feedback that informs the next iteration.
This assignment is most effective when you give and get substantive feedback—both positive and negative—to every single thing on the wall. In many environments, people do not get feedback on bad work. It’s more common to point out aspirational examples that everyone should aim for. But that’s way too abstract. To build this muscle of critique and hone your design abilities, look at the whole set.
Full anonymity with regard to whose work is whose might not be possible in every context—and that’s fine. To help with this, make sure the work is shared in a standard format. You’re just trying to create a more unified, objective experience. As your group gets better and better at this type of critique, you won’t need to work so hard on the anonymity aspect.