How To Think Wrong

It's great to read about other more experienced designers having – or at least once having had – similar problems as I had again and again during my studies and still have now while I'm facing my final project at the academy. I recently read a nice essay that was published on Thinking for a Living and was written by John Bielenberg, partner and co-founder of C2 in San Francisco and founder of Project M, a summer programm in Maine to inspire young creatives.

It's titled «4 Steps To Idiocy (And 1 Step To Sheer Genius)» and describes the most important steps in John's career as a graphic designer. It starts with him studying graphic design at college, learning the basic skills etc. and leads to a point in his life when he realized that he was an idiot. Although he was very successful and

… was making decent money and driving a somewhat nice car.

an experience he made within the context of one of his jobs revealed the ingrained patterns of behaviour to him which had determined all his creative work he had done so far – just like they don't let you have any doubt that

… swimming with great white sharks can be a tragic mistake.

What John had become aware of was the fact that the things he had learned, all the aspects that he accepted to be preset kept him from accessing his full creative potential to do more powerful works.

I was actually severely limited by my built-in biases. My brain was automatically short-cutting to solutions for my work without exploring the range of possibilities available, one of which could be brilliantly unexpected and effective.

But it's not that easy to overcome these patterns and to start to act against their dictation. I'm still working on finishing the first step John describes and I already know the feeling of being limited by adopted patterns of thought. But now that I've read this article there is a bit of hope arising from my totally twisted mind. So thanks, John, for sharing this! Maybe I should experiment with one of the techniques he mentioned? Or are there any better ones? (via Thinking for a Living)

[Update] Oh, I just found a video of John talking about C2 and breaking the «heuristic bias»: