12 pathways to inspired design

As a designer, inspiration (along with successful execution of ideas) is at the top of the list in terms of importance to a designers success. Without inspiration and ideas designers wouldn’t be designers and their demise would follow relatively speedily.

Keeping the fount of inspiration and ideas flowing can be difficult. Here are 12 ways that will help you keep a river of ideas and inspiration running and give your creative juices a shot in the arm.

Active Listening

Practice active listening. Active listening or listening for meaning is basically taking the time to understand, interpret, and evaluate what other people are saying to you. This can translate to being inspired because you actually listen to what people are telling you and this will mean you are more likely to find problems that need to be solved or areas where you can make improvements, which will lead to more inspired ideas.

Experience New Things

Getting out and experiencing something new exposes you to huge amounts of potentially inspiring stuff. It might be new situations, new foods, new activities or new locations or any other new experience. The key is doing or engaging with something that is new to you. Anything new means you brain has to actively process the incoming information. As it processes the information it will be looking for relationships and connections. It will also be on the look out for completely new pieces of information. Basically it will be trying to file everything for reference now or later. As it is filing it is actively examining each piece of information, meaning that you will be forced to think about things. All that new information, categorisation and thinking will all provide your brain with a huge amount of stimulation that will lead to new ideas, and plenty of them.

Relaxation

Everyday we come into contact with so much new information that we simply cannot process it all at once. Taking the time to relax, whether its kicking back on the sofa, drinking a beer with friends or even going to a dedicated relaxation class, will mean your brain has time to process all the information that has been collected (not necessarily just the information from that day either) and make further connections or establish previously unthought of connections. These new and previously unthought of connections and links will lead you to think of new ideas.

Exercise

These days we all spend a lot of time using a computer, surfing the web, reading books and being generally sedentary. Although this keeps our minds active and healthy, we also need to keep our body healthy. It could be regular walking, running, cycling, swimming or other sport/physical activity. Doing a physical activity will keep the body healthy, which will lead to a the body and mind being in tune. This balance will mean you will most likely feel better and be better equipped to come up with new ideas.

Travel

Experiencing new things was mentioned earlier as a great way to get inspiration. By far one of the best ways to be rapidly and regularly exposed to new things is by travelling. You might travel locally, nationally or internationally. It doesn’t matter which you choose as each will lead to new experiences, however the further you travel the more likely you are to be exposed to completely new things. Travel will expose you to extremely new situations, people, experiences, foods, languages, landscapes and much much more. Travel is the turbo charged way to experiencing new things.

Socialise

Being social is an excellent path to being inspired and generating new ideas. Being social means that you are talking to people, friends, family, acquaintances or even strangers. Talking to people therefore means that you will again be potentially exposed to a new idea or way of looking at the world that could just provide that inspirational spark for that next fantastic idea.

Discuss Your Ideas

While general socalising will help you get inspiration or ideas, actively and openly discussing your ideas is a great way to get insight or sound out an idea. It may also help you discover if someone has beat you to the punch or if there are similar ideas out there. It will also allow you to gauge reactions and get feedback to improve the idea. Talking about an idea will probably lead you on tangents which will help you develop a more robust idea or inspire a completely new one. Keeping your ideas to yourself usually leads to you not following through on them or leads to the idea being half baked. A fantastic example of how sharing and speaking about an idea can improve it is the Blunt Umbrella. The designer of the Blunt Umbrella even admits that it would never have happened if he hadn’t told his friends and colleagues because they wouldn’t have kept asking him if he had done it yet. Discussion can also lead to the next pathway to inspired design which is collaboration.

Collaborate

The next step in discussing ideas is often collaboration. Collaborating with others on developing an idea means that there is more than one person involved, which means there are exponentially more sources of inspiration and ideas to draw upon. As the old saying goes, two heads are better than one. Collaboration also creates a situation where many of the other pathways naturally occur. When collaborating you are more likely to discuss ideas, experiment, socialise and experience new things.

Find a Mentor

Finding someone who is more experienced  than you are, whom you respect for their achievements and getting them to be a mentor helps to inspire great design and ideas. Having a Mentor will help you to engage in several of the other pathways to inspired design that are complied in this article. A mentor can help you by talking about your ideas, introducing you to others whom you can discuss your ideas with and they may also be able to suggest some beneficial new experiences. They can also inspire you because their own achievements are admirable (if you don’t admire their achievements and respect them then why are they your mentor?) and because you can benefit from them sharing their experience with you or giving you guidance (this means that you don’t necessarily have to go some of the new experiences that might be painful).

Experiment

Experimentation is guaranteed to lead to more inspiration and ideas. Experimentation is a fundamental way to generate new ideas or get inspired as it forces you to actively try out new ways of doing, seeing or thinking. Its means that you are likely to actually try out your idea and then find out if it does or doesn’t work. It will help you stumble across something new that will inspire another great design idea or help you refine the current one.

Observe

Taking the time to actively observe the world around you, the people in it and the way that people interact with the world will inspire you. A great way to do this is to find a good vantage point in a busy area. Here in Melbourne a great place to do this is the restaurants and bars along South Bank where you can look out at the people going by. Public spaces such as parks or squares are great as well. You might even take the time to observe how other animal species interact with the world around them or even to consider how plants interact with their surroundings. Like Active Listening, Active Observation will tune you into what is actually happening. It will force you to understand, interpret, and evaluate what you are seeing and lead you to find unique or interesting ways of doing that will inspire you and inform your ideas and designs.

Unplug

Unplugging yourself from the digital world, from immediate communication and from constant connectivity (internet, mobile phone etc…) will help you be more inspired or generate ideas. In the time you would normally spend surfing the web or texting your friends you are able to take the time to actively listen, experience new things, relax, exercise, travel, socialise, discuss your ideas, collaborate, find a mentor, experiment and actively observe.

Unplugging is one of the single biggest factors in helping you find inspiration and ideas in our fast paced, constantly connected society. It will stop you trawling the web looking at design porn and thinking oh wow that design is amazing, I could have done that and will start you on the path to being the one who is inspired and coming up with all those amazing designs. I am not saying you need to unplug permanently, just enough to put into practice the other pathways to creating more inspired design and ideas.

As a designer, what would you encourage the rest of us to do to maximize our creative potential and to keep the inspiration and ideas flowing?