Creative Blocks

What is creativity? Is it something that you just sort of *wait for* to fall on you from above? Or is it something you *work at*? Do you all have those moments when you  you know you need a spark of creativity? You're in the midst of designing something; you're trying to make a new website; you're trying to make a new application; you're trying to work out how to evaluate something

that's hard to evaluate – perhaps  the way people feel or something like this. And you want that *moment of inspiration*, and does it come when you need it? Of course it doesn't! The model we have of creativity tends to be about these moments of genius. And you already heard about, I think, the 3M story, the Post-it Notes. You know – imagine if you'd had that idea to use this sort of magic glue on the back to create Post-it Notes; how much money there has been on Post-it Notes. Or Philippe Starck and the – well, we all know the lemon juicer is not perhaps all it's cooked up to be,

that it dribbles all over your fingers and stuff, but boy is it iconic! And everybody who's anybody in design would like one of those lemon squeezers sitting on their kitchen worktop! We have this idea of creativity as a genius activity. It might be Steve Jobs in Apple or some of these designers we're looking at here, perhaps Einstein. But is that the full story? Certainly that's the sort of way it seems if you look at sort of

Western traditions of thinking about these things. Going way back to the Greeks, you've got the Muses, the different arts, and the idea that somehow or other this inspiration comes from the Muses up in Olympus and gives you these bright ideas, whether it's poetry or whether it's music ... or web design! So, is that the real story? Let's look a little bit back at these two we've been looking at. First of all, let's look back at the Post-it Notes.

The story is a little bit more complicated; it's not just – you probably know a little bit about this; it wasn't just a moment of inspiration. The guy who was trying to design these things – well, he *wasn't* trying to design these things; the guy was called Spencer Silver; 1968, and he's trying to design a really good glue. And he makes his glue, and he puts it on the back of some paper, and he sticks it to something, and it just... pulls straight off again. Whatever he sticks it to, it's rubbish.

Now, I don't know if you've done  this. You've been scribbling away at something; you've got lots  of ideas, perhaps on your napkin... and you're about to throw it away. When you're about to do that, when you're about to throw it in the bin, pull it out again, have another peek because you never know when you might have a *moment of genius*. Spencer Silver was like this, but he knew  there was something about this.

There was something about this he felt could be useful. He spent five years going around 3M talking to people, giving seminars and talks and  talking about this solution in need of a problem. And then, in 1974, a guy called Arthur Fry was in one of these talks and came back to Spencer and said, 'I have an idea.'

Five years, two people, and an idea that could have been.... And that would throw the whole lot away  in the bin before it ever started. Okay, let's look at the lemon squeezer  now. So, Philippe Starck – I think it was in Italy, but he's in a restaurant somewhere. And the story is he's thinking about lemon squeezers; he has this sort of inspiration of a squid,

and hence we get the iconic lemon squeezer. But of course, first of all that's not built just  on that meal time. He knows about lemon squeezers; he's seen lots of lemon squeezers, lemon squeezers which have some of the suggestions – especially if you look at those kind that you do this to – of the one  on the bottom, or be it the other way around; maybe it would work better if you have the sharp end up. But even that – it's not as simple as that. He wrote down on, perhaps it was a  tablecloth – certainly in some of these Italian restaurants you get paper tablecloths

that get taken away, thrown away at the end. But this tablecloth has been preserved, or this napkin has been preserved. And when you look at that, you see things, images, some of them which look pretty much like standard lemon squeezers, and gradually shifting. The order is not so clear. But it looks pretty much like actually the squid came quite late in the day. So, when he tells the story, of course the squid is hot in his imagination, but when you  actually look at the trace of the design,

there were a lot of stages, goodness knows how many sketches, on this very small piece of paper that eventually came up with this idea. So, even something that took quite a short amount of time, unlike the 3M Post-it Notes, which took five years to gestate, this happened quite quickly. But even, so there was quite an *evolutionary  process* in actually coming up with the idea. So, the question is – can we have *techniques* to help us do this kind of thing?

Not necessarily to turn us into immediate magic geniuses, but to actually get reasonable creative ideas when we need them.

A guy called Wallas published a book and in it included talking about stages of creativity. So, let's look at these four stages. So, they talk about *preparation*. That's the things you do like gathering information, getting yourself into the space that understands the problem. *Incubation* – which is a period when you're  not directly thinking about the problem,

but it's bubbling around somewhere. *Illumination* – which is that 'Ah! Got it!' And then – and people use different words for this – *verification*, checking whether it really does do the job, or *implementation*, actually using it to make something.

We're going to look at ways  to nurture your own creativity, to create spaces, places, times that  encourage you to be more creative. First of all, we are going to talk about  environments, both physical environments and temporal environments. So, first of  all the *culture of an organization*. Actually, there's been an enormous amount written about the way organizations can be better-suited

to be innovative, to be creative; so, I'm just going to give you a little taste of this now, but there's a lot you could learn about this. One of the most crucial things is about organizations which are *forgiving of failure*. Now, towards the beginning of this video series about creativity, I talked about bad ideas, and one of the things  about bad ideas is you can afford to have a bad, bad idea because that's what it's there for. But in a lot of our work, when something fails,

we think something's gone badly wrong. But often *failure is a point to learn*: Why did it fail? What could happen next time? Or even to actually look at that failure and say maybe there's something in what went wrong that's actually good. If you never *fail*, you probably never do anything that's really brilliant, really exciting. Every good expedition has risk associated with it. Risk means *it can go wrong*.

And if things can't go wrong, they probably can't go very right. Often it's important, though, to try and fail as quickly as possible, so there's an interesting tension here. And this is obviously a part  of the way design processes work. You often try and produce a lot of ideas early on, knowing that you're going to have to filter through them to find the ones that you actually want to continue. What you don't want to do is have the failure being there when the product is delivered. So, there's a bit of tension between being very forgiving of failure, being able to do things

which are a little bit risky and may not work and yet also being able to keep an eye on that, to  be able to manage that process and to look out for the times when things perhaps ought to be put aside, not necessarily forgotten entirely. Now I'm going to remind you about that story right at the beginning about Post-it Notes. There's the guy who invented Post-it Notes – or rather, the guy who failed to invent the glue,

tried to make a glue that wasn't sticky enough: a failure. He didn't try and pretend that it was working – you know – didn't try and sell it as glue that worked. He knew there was something about it, and effectively filed it, but knew too it was something to look at again. That's quite an important lesson. He knew he hadn't done what he wanted to do, so he knew it wasn't working, but also hadn't entirely forgotten about it. Now, also think about what then happened later in that story. He went around telling people

in the organization. Now... just think about this; he was telling people about the thing that went wrong, which is, well, actually, that sounds a bit  daunting, doesn't it? Why would you tell people about your failures? It was because he had this *feeling* that that glue would be useful for something. Now, this gets back to a second  cultural issue. Cultures that *encourage sharing* are more likely to be *creative cultures*.

In order to do that, you have to have a level of  trust of your colleagues, the ability to share things, to believe that in doing so you're not sort of giving away your crown jewels of your idea. For certain things, when you give something  away, you've got less yourself. But, actually, with ideas – *an idea shared is an idea multiplied*. There's more idea often when you've shared it and bounced it off somebody than when you hold it in yourself. But organizations have to *create a culture where people trust each other*

where there is attribution and award given to everybody who's involved in that process – the original concept, to the person who develops it and turns it into something that's actually useful. In order to have those sharings, often you need  to try and create the *places* where that sharing can happen. And by 'place', I'll use it in a very broad sense – both physical places but also times. So, sometimes it's a physical place. You've all heard about *the water cooler effect*.

People go, they gather – whether  it's a water cooler, whether it's the place where you have your kettle or your coffee  machine – people gather there. You get those *unplanned conversations* where suddenly something comes into somebody's head through that connection. So, what you need to do is *plan for the unplanned*, which is a bit of an oxymoron but actually can happen. There are techniques to help you do this. *Space syntax* is something that was developed by

The Bartlett School of Architecture and is a way of  looking at a space and actually trying to work out where are the potential places where people  are likely to have this sort of chance meeting. Often it's at the *junction of viewpoints*. It's where perhaps multiple corridors meet or something like that. Or it might be perhaps that there's windows that look out onto a central area that you can all see as things are going on. So, you can try and plan to create physical spaces that encourage those.

Sometimes, it might be more about creating *special times* in those places. That might be *away days*. You often have this – you've probably been involved here where you go off-site somewhere or maybe even within your organization but to a different part of the building. You're shutting yourself off – off from telephone calls and interruptions; but also by going into a different space together, you are able to discuss things in a different way.

You feel differently about that place. Maybe you might have meeting-free days; you might deliberately say every Wednesday there are no meetings. Ways to create space where people can both have freedom to think themselves but also to meet with  others. Now, as you saw that crossover between the physical environment and the time and the means of sharing in the physical environment. Physical environment also we know is important individually.

So, it's actually gone down again – the wind was quite loud here because I'm sitting in a room that's just opposite the sea. I quite like to be able to look out and see  those open environments. Other people prefer something that's more of blank white walls. Often, poets, novelists have had places to go to. There's a picture here of Dylan Thomas's boat house where he wrote a lot of his poetry. George Orwell – I've got a copy here  of *1984* – he wrote *1984* on this little

– I think it wasn't a little cottage; actually it might have been quite a big house at the very northern tip of Jura, which is about as far as you can get away from civilization that you can get in the United Kingdom, way off on this little Scottish island at the end of nowhere. And that was where he found space, even though he was actually ailing in his health at that point, to actually write – and write what's become a seminal work of fiction.

In a design studio, you might also have things like mood boards, designing around putting photographs – whether that's coming from your participants or your subjects or from just things that you have inspiration to think about. If you come across cultural probes, this is  when you give people these little packs that have things like postcards for writing or photographs  to take where your subjects, your end users have created things – you can then put those in your environment,

ways of making your environment one that sparks  creativity, sparks thoughts for you. Crucially also is getting into *users' real contexts*. Again, this is a way – I mean, it's important for eliciting knowledge, but important also for understanding, getting that rich sense that enables you to be able to think of things that  are original and yet suited to the person. Many years ago, actually right at the very beginning of my career in

understanding user interfaces and human-computer interactions, I worked at a local government for the sort of IT or computing department. One of my earliest jobs was to create a printout, an annual printout, or to *update an annual printout* for the Pensions department. And I met with the head of the Pensions department; we talked about how this printout, which was basically one line on a line-printer listing

per pensioner at the end of the year, what this man wanted in it. So, he was the head of the department. We talked together in my office for about an hour. And several times I asked him how he used the printout, and I never felt I really understood what it was used for. Later on, I produced the first example; so, I had my listing that had come off. And I said this is old green-and-white lined paper – so, this is very, very old stuff.

Anyway, I rang him up and said, 'It's come off the printer.' And he said, 'Oh, I'll come to your office.'  And I said, 'Well, why don't I go to you?' So, I went to his office, where there were other people working, a few clerical people who did work for him. And at that stage, I said, 'What do you do with this listing?' And then, he said 'oh' and he went to a filing cabinet and he brought out these little five-by-three paper cards and said, 'Oh, we take this number from here and this number from here and we put it there.' 

And I said, 'Oh! Would you like me to add those two numbers together?' And he said, 'Ah! Can you do that?!' In my office, he wasn't able to see the  potential of the technology, and we're talking simple technology, but even that. I wasn't able to understand the nature of his problem well enough. When we were in his environment, in the *real  environment where the real work happened*, suddenly we were able to see the better solution  that meant he actually had something that fitted

his uses much better than anything  we got from our more abstract discussions.

Sometimes, though, *habits, regular things*  can also help with creativity. Often, when I've been talking about creativity in these videos, it's been about sort of inspiration, those moments, things that are unplanned, often quite chaotic. Sometimes you want the kick that makes us think of something entirely new. But sometimes actually having *regularity* can be a positive thing as well.

So, we're going to talk a little bit about that. Often actually changing your physical location, we've talked about the importance of designing physical locations, but actually just the act of having multiple ones can be an important thing to do. So, for instance, if I'm sitting at my desk, I'm in a different mode of working than if I sit on a comfy chair. I might sit on my comfy chair and read a book, or perhaps comment on something that I've got to read and comment back on.

Whereas on my desk, I might feel more I need to be productive in typing things. If the computer is in front of me, even if it's closed and I'm reading a book, I might be constantly itching to  open it and read email. The very act of being in a different place *resets your mind*, says, 'I'm doing something different.' So, it may be you want to try and design your working environment. Now, that might be about almost being in different rooms. It might be about facing different walls. It might be going to a coffee shop.

The early Harry Potter's were written in a particular coffee shop in Edinburgh. There may be places you go to; it might be, I said, as simple as looking in a different direction, sitting in a different chair that puts you into a different frame of mind. So, some frames of mind might be more, 'I'm being productive and doing something.' Others might be more expansive in thinking. So, that's about habits of mind, so you create these slightly different circumstances

that help you to think differently. Now, that's true of where you sit. But it's also true perhaps of what you're wearing. So, I mean, literally perhaps the hats – we  often talk about wearing different hats. Now, if you're a hat-wearer, you  might actually have your thinking cap that you put on. I certainly use T-shirts quite a lot. I mean, I wear T-shirts, and I actually sometimes use them to create little personas for myself.

So, at the moment, in these creativity slides I've been wearing this T-shirt. I do wash it in between. And it was given to me by my daughter, who is an actor, and it's sort of geometric and slightly perhaps ambiguous and unstructured. And so, it feels like quite a nice one to wear when I'm talking about creativity. Also, when I've been doing statistics slides, I've been wearing this T-shirt, which is – actually, it's not statistics, what's on it – it's semantic web keywords.

But it looks a bit techie, so again feels quite a good one to wear for statistics. And of course if I go running, I wear different T-shirts, perhaps my Tiree Ultramarathon T-shirt, just to show that I can put some fitness in as well. So, by wearing *different clothes*, you  might again put yourself into different frames of mind but also create a persona of yourself.

So, by doing something different, by being somewhere different, you go from being the 'I'm working on graphic design.' to 'I'm working on thinking about people.' modes. Or it might be going from management to creative modes, but choosing different ways of being. So, *dressing up*, *where you are*. Sometimes by *time* – we can organize time. Now, this is a particular place where we cross over to

bits of time management, but – and there's different video series about that – but *time routines can often help us*. I'm a James Bond fan. I've got – this is  *Goldfinger*, one of the very early – it's a 1961 copy of *Goldfinger*. Ian Fleming worked for – I've forgotten which it is – one of the major London newspapers. But he had two months a year when he went to Jamaica,

to – he had a house there called 'Goldeneye'. And every morning – and I've forgotten the numbers for this; I was trying to look them up and I've missed them – but it was something like he would get up and he would write a thousand words. And then he would go snorkeling in the water, and lovely warm Jamaican waters. Then he would go back, presumably dry, have some breakfast, and then write another 500 words. And then that was him done for the day, and he did other things.

And every day he did that. And at the end of two months – and you could do the sums to work out if I've got my number of words right – but he had the next James Bond novel written. So, he created a timetable for himself during the day. Now, that was a timetable about *producing*. Sometimes, it's more inspirational things. So, there's a technique that some people do, which is that you go to a dictionary and every morning you sort of randomly open it,

you choose a word, and you write a *poem* where that word is crucial, or at least that word is in it somewhere and it's a crucial part of the poem. Now, the poems don't have to be that good.  So, this is not about producing the wonderful work of poetry that's going to change the world. But it's about getting yourself into a mindset where *you are being productive* and thinking about things  and building that habit that says, 'When I want to write a poem, I can write a poem. That's easy.' – you know.

'And when I want to write a particular poem about a particular thing, that's different.' But the actual act of just writing a poem becomes something that's natural, something you can almost turn on. A personal example of that for me was some years ago I wrote a regular editorial on HCI education for  SIGCHI Bulletin, which was the members' magazine for ACM SIGCHI. What would happen is each – it was  every two months,

and every two months I'd come to deadline day and I'd not written anything, I'd not thought about it at all, and it had to be one page of ACM two-column layout, which is about 850  words. And what would happen is I was completely blank; I'd get up and I'd often go off for a walk or something like that; thoughts would mill through my head; and I'd come back and I'd write it, and by  midday I had something written. And I knew I had to do it; the deadline helped. I'm rotten at doing things without deadlines.

But I would get to that deadline and I would have written something that had a patterning to it, had a focus, usually a little bit of something current, some sort of deep issue all mixed together. And that taught me a lot. I learnt to write – my craft of writing. It wasn't necessarily the best writing ever produced, but I learned my craft. I was doing something regularly and therefore building up the skill set. That then meant that when I wrote other kinds of writing I was better prepared to do that.

Now, these kind of things – none of these work necessarily for everyone, and some techniques work better for some, just like all the other kinds of techniques we've talked about. But it's certainly worth trying these kinds of things.

What I want to do now is talk about a  few other kinds of divergent techniques. Creativity has two sides to it. There's being *novel* and being *useful*. There's a *divergent side* – that's having  lots and lots of bright ideas –  and a *convergent* side – that tries to  turn those ideas into something that's more useful and buildable. So, first of all, I want to talk about *oxymorons*.

If you want to use this in a more directed way,  actually as perhaps a way of helping you to ideate about your problem, you want  to focus on something specific. One way to do that is just to look at  something and think, 'What do I normally think of as an essential characteristic of this  thing?' And think of a *concrete feature*. It's hard to think nicely abstractly; think concrete. And then just in some way negate it or remove it. So, I've got a couple of examples here. You might think of the word processor with no cursor.

If there's no cursor, how do you know where you're going to type? Well, maybe that's part of the fun of it, and, in fact, if you've got a touchpad,  I accidentally keep touching my touchpad and the cursor jumps all over the place; actually, that's annoying. But are there some advantages of that? You know – perhaps it helps create juxtapositions that you haven't thought of before (perhaps a good creativity technique)? Could you have a word processor with no cursor? One that you perhaps when you type the text always appeared in a sort of fixed area and then you dragged it to where you wanted it?

So, certainly it forces you to think like that. You might have PowerPoint with no projector, but then you might think, 'Well, if I had no projector, would I still find my PowerPoint useful? Well, perhaps it would help me to guide what I'm talking about.' So, just like here, I'm talking to video, but I also have slides. And they're probably going to end up being edited to different slides by the time you see them. But they're still doing a job for me. So, that's a bit about oxymorons. Let's move on to a different divergent technique – *random metaphors*.

So, the idea here is you think about something;  and my window is closed, so I'm not getting too much direct light, but I'm just glancing around the room. I have here a little bag that I put things in that goes into my suitcase when I travel. And it's got things like, I think, a little hard disk drive in and plenty of teabags because I like lots of teabags. So, random metaphor:

A word processor is like a bag that goes into my suitcase, or a word processor is like a teabag. So, I usually find it, if I want to think of a random metaphor, if you're not careful, 'I think, "A word processor is like..." and then I go for a quill pen'? You know – because – you know – I'm not being that random, so I usually try and really make it random, or... reach for your dictionary! A word processor is like a fingertip, or the word above 'fingertip' was 'fingerprint'.

So, random metaphors. In fact, the first time I articulated random metaphors was one of two times in my life I can remember getting a spontaneous round of applause from an undergraduate lecture. Now, it is quite tough getting applause from an undergraduate lecture. And I won't act it with quite the vigor I did for the lecture, because I'm going to knock the  camera over if I do. But the idea is:

There was Professor Schwartz. And Professor Schwartz is getting on a bit, and he's at this networking conference, a big international networking conference. And he's been around for years, and often behind the scenes – he's the man who was behind the internet – you know. You know about ARPANET and how it all started, but he was one of the key figures. Wi-Fi – you know – again started in the Xerox (inaudible), but Professor Schwartz was the person  they always talked to and

really a lot of the ideas came from. And Professor Schwartz is at the desk, at the lectern in front, and he's talking, he's looking up and he said, 'Ah...' – you know – and he's giving the major keynote for this conference. And he's getting on a bit, so maybe it's the last time  he'll give a keynote. And he's giving this keynote at this conference, and he does it with the vigor and commitment that he always does. And he said, 'The metaphor, the image, the idea of  networking in the next century is...'

(coughing) And he obviously has a little bit  of a problem (inaud.); he's getting on a bit, so you expect this. (Coughing) He sorts himself out, perhaps takes a quick drink of water. Okay, and he continues. 'The image –' (coughing) 'The image of networking for the next century –' (coughing) 'is... The image of networking for  the next century is spaghetti bolognese.'

(coughing) He's getting a bit red in the face by this point, and to be honest, the audience are getting a  little worried. But, anyway, he continues. (coughing) 'The image of networking for  the next century is spaghetti bologn—' (coughing) 'spaghetti bolognese with parmesan on top.' And with that, he falls to the ground.

Now, to this day, I'm never sure whether the spontaneous applause was because of the  skill of my acting at that point or was because they thought I'd actually died  and were glad that the lecture had ended. However, I'll let you make your own  decisions on that one. The crucial thing is, imagine this conference happened. Everybody goes home afterwards and they think – well, first of all, they mourn the passing of Professor Schwartz because he was such a figure in their area. But then they start to think – now, I don't know

if you know any networking people; networking people do *layers* a lot; they talk about layers. So, if it had been lasagna, they'd have understood. But it was spaghetti bolognese. And this parmesan cheese was  clearly critical – you know – he *died* getting those words out. What did it mean? Can you imagine the creativity of the ideas as all those people went back to laboratories and said, 'What was it he meant? What could be the meaning behind this?'

Whether any of them would be the meaning that Schwartz had in his head, who knows? But so much creativity. So, Choose your random metaphor; take it from the dictionary. Glance around your room. But imagine you've been given that metaphor  by the ultimate person in your discipline. What does it mean? Play with it. Live  with it. And see if you get some ideas.

Okay, let's move on; more – oh,  more brilliant, so we've had the genius in your field; now we have the brilliant designer... *of awful things*. So, one of the reasons you might come to a  design is because there's something existing and it doesn't work very well. So, either you're going to completely redesign it; you're going to do a new word processor, for instance, or you're just going to fix some feature that's wrong with it. And there are things about it you *hate*.

They're really bad, and the users hate them as well – really bad. Imagine that actually you know the person who designed it was an absolutely brilliant designer in their area. Now, obviously they made a bit  of a hash up because things are going wrong. But that feature that's causing problems – imagine it was done *for a reason*. So, and I hadn't thought of examples  before then,

but I was mentioning actually with touchpads when the way my finger touches it and the text goes all over the place. That's a terrible thing to happen, but does that make me think about my writing more? I mean, actually, I think it doesn't. But never mind; let's imagine – what are the positive things behind the fact that when my thumb touches the  touchpad, my cursor jumps all over the place? If you can imagine that there  was a really good reason for that, even though it doesn't work for other purposes, one is you start to have new ideas, but the other thing is

if that reason actually  is an advantage, it's happening for people, if you change it without being aware of that, if you edit and change the software, you might get rid of the problem that people are having, but you also might lose that advantage. So, by understanding the advantages of the thing that you're going to deal with, then you can start to change it in a way that preserves those strengths as you get rid of the weaknesses. So, this is a bit like bad ideas – analyzing those bad ideas.

And, in fact, the prompts that I gave you for the bad ideas you can apply to the software. You know – what is *good* about it? What's *really bad* about it? Not just the surface thing that's bad about it? You know – so the fact that my thumb when it touches the touchpad makes the cursor jump, in itself that's not a bad thing. The problem is that as I type, my typing goes into a random place. So, what's really deep? What's not just the surface thing that's wrong? What are the deep things that are wrong? But also, what's good? What's positive?

Okay, and last on these, this  series of divergent techniques, I want to talk about *arbitrary constraints*. Now, in one sense, you'd think being divergent is about breaking boundaries, living without constraints,  opening up. Weirdly – and this is something that's been found again and again in the creativity literature – is: *sometimes adding constraints can help people be more creative*. So, when you start with that blank piece of paper,

it can be hard, can't it? The tabula rasa. '...Ah!' – you know. I want my wonderful bright idea.... Nothing comes. What happens often is if there is a constraint, so 'I'm going to design a new word processor, but it has to look exactly like the existing spreadsheet,' or 'I'm going to design a new mobile phone, but it has to

work when somebody's holding it in their left hand while bicycling.' You put a very strong constraint on it – you know. 'I'm going to design a chair, but it's going to be a metal chair, not a random chair – it's going to be made of metal, or papier-mâché.' You put a constraint. When you do that, people are forced – one is it makes it more concrete; so, it's in some sense easier, but you're also forced to be creative about that process, about pushing those constraints together. In reality, we always work within  constraints, but sometimes adding constraints

– now, they could be silly constraints or they could be just more fixed ones that make sense but aren't necessarily really given by the problem. Now, you might later on remove the constraint. But *adding the constraint helps you to think more clearly and more concretely*, and *often more creatively*. So, you can do that with *materials*. Another way you often do that is with *time*. I don't know if you've noticed it – if there's a hard deadline,

have you noticed the way you just, you think you're going to work  hard on it, and you do, and... Not a lot happens. And then, suddenly, as  the deadline approaches... and all sorts of stuff happens. So, sometimes, not having much of something or having been forced to do something is better than having complete freedom, even if you want to think out of the box and creatively.

Do you ever get stuck? I do. You're trying to do something; you know it's important... nothing happens – impasse. So, why does this happen? There are  obviously many, many reasons for this. Sometimes, it's because the task – and we're talking about creative work here – this is because of things that are emotionally or intellectually hard

and you just need that breakthrough; you just need to get it. A special case of that is where there's  a *decision* needed. And it might be that you've actually done the thinking that's allowed you to think, 'Well, there's this path or there's this path...' but you don't know which to  do, and you get lost in it. And there are probably other reasons as well, but what I'm going to do is talk about those two a little bit. So, first of all, *emotionally hard tasks*.

One of the sure signs I find to know I've got one of these is when I find myself doing other things. I'm doing *displacement activities*; so, it might be doing lots of email, keeping going and looking at that; sometimes I have a pack of cards and I play patience. If you're doing a *displacement activity*, that's a sure sign that something was *hard* and you're putting off doing it. Again, I'm sure you'll have done this yourself.

The other thing I can find myself doing is spending all of the day not doing something. So, it's one thing doing work and not having succeeded at the end. But this is: I'll spend the day with something to do, and at the end of the day not have done anything *at all* because the thing I knew I had to do is so hard, I sort of know I need to do it; I don't do other things, because I need to do that, and therefore I do nothing at all.

When that's happening – so, if you get that impasse, you are wasting your time. But on the whole if you're focusing on something, you're fixed on it and you're not achieving, you're wasting your time. You need to *do something else*. However important it was, if you're not achieving it, you're not achieving it. So, you might as well be doing something else. And actually often doing something else makes it more likely to achieve the first one. So, one thing you might do is try – we've talked  about this a little bit with breaking things down –

*try and find an easier preparation*. So, this is taking up your mind; you can't do it. So, can you do something easier? Can you find those previous materials that are related to it? Is there something you can do which can contribute but is a doable thing that you can just get on with, that's busywork? Another thing you might do is *just choose to make your own mental space*. I've talked about mental space for that thing, but you might just say, 'Okay, I'm clearly not making progress on this.'

You know – if the deadline's tomorrow, okay... you've got to get on with it, although if you're like me, when the deadline's there, you will get it done. But if you're not making progress, 'I'll do that one tomorrow. I'll do it next week.' And then do something else; do one of the other tasks that you've got to do. I said sometimes you can't, because it's the only thing you do – it's got an imminent deadline. But if you can put it off and reschedule it, you've given yourself mental space.

You can do something else; you could at least get something done. Surprisingly, often when you do that, actually as  soon as you start doing something else, you start to realize things that you could be doing about the thing that took you so long you failed to do. The other thing is this *decision making* where  you actually have a pretty good idea of what to do, but there's two of them or three of them – you know: don't know which. You know – you've got two different ways you might achieve that to-do list application.

'Shall I do it that way or that way?' Now, sometimes there is busywork  you can do to help you make that decision, to help you find the information. So, that might be making some prototypes and user-testing them. It might be reading the literature to find out what other people have done and if there's any insights from that. So, sometimes you can do that. The other thing you can do is another example of Micawber management: *Constructive procrastination: put off the decision*.

Now, by 'put off' that might be like we've talked about emotionally hard tasks, saying, 'Okay, I know I need to do these two; I've got other things I can do; I'll put off the decision till next week.' And maybe when you come back to it, it'll be easy. But the other way to put off a decision is to *find things that you can do* but *work whichever decision you make*. Now, if you're driving down a road and you come to a fork on the road, obviously you can't do anything in between.

But very often with the tasks that we have to do, there are things that are common. So, I've done – you know – I've written these as 'abc's. But you can imagine, one way you do this, you're going to need to do three subsidiary things – a, b and c. The other way you're going to need to do three subsidiary things – x, b and y, but b has to happen *whatever*. So, for instance, again in the to-do list application, it might be that the way you organize

the list itself perhaps of things – you've got two completely different ways of doing that. One is very graphical; the other is very 'listy'. But whichever way you do it, when you look at an individual to-do item, perhaps that's going to be less different – in which case, get on; do your UX design on that individual item. Maybe you're going to need a login  for them all; you're going to need to have a way of, say, saving it or something like that.

Do those bits. *Do all the bits that are the same irrespective* of what you're going to do. You're making progress, which is going to make you feel good; it's going to make you feel that you can achieve, which is going to help you to do the difficult different things, help you make the decision. But also as you elaborate the bits that are shared, maybe that will help you understand the decision better. Maybe you'll realize as you work out how you view the individual task on the to-do list

that suddenly you realize that 'That way of doing this just wouldn't work as well as that way; this will flow much better,' because you've elaborated those common bits better. So, doing these things that are shared will often help you to make the decision, as well as being positive work that you're doing. Also, if you've worked on certain things, it might  mean that you're in a better position to try out things; maybe you can soft-prototype different techniques.

You think, 'Okay, although this seems like a major decision between this and this,' once you've got all those common bits in place, you might be able to *try both*, and try them both out. Maybe you might use different techniques. You might sort of soft-prototype some bits, but have sort of more detailed (inaudible) bits for the bits where you've really worked out in detail. But maybe it will just help you to make those decision-making processes and make you try things. A special case, which is probably more for the UI developer

than the UX designer, is if you develop some sort  of infrastructure or tools. But even in UX design, something like creating the palettes of different kinds of objects you're going to need – you know – some of those might be different between the two. But having produced one, you've got something that you can then apply and will also be ready so that once you've decided amongst those two major options, actually a lot of the detail design of the UX will just flow out because

you've already done such detailed work on the common bit parts. So, again, things you can do just to not make the decision go away, but make it a softer, easier thing that comes and flows in more slowly, and I say often because of that, becomes easy when you actually have to do it. It's about *things that can help reduce  commitment*. And so, that sounds like a bad thing... about everybody's supposed to be committed to stuff,

but actually *reducing commitment* in the short run can help you be more creative, be more experimental, try things out, whether that's sketching things; bad ideas was about reducing emotional commitment; doodling, coding – because often the impasse, the block is that you know that once you write those first few words, once you make that first line on the  paper, once you write that first line of code,

that you're making that decision that's something  that's hard to change later. Do something – do things that make you feel that what you're doing is *less significant*; it's contributing but less significant. So, that might be saying, 'Well, I need to make – it's either one of these or one of these. Let's just do sketches of them both.' You know – do very low-fi prototypes of them both. I mean, you probably think about doing that, so and that's why low-fi prototyping is so powerful, because it allows you to try things out and not make the decision ahead of time.

If you're doing coding, what you might think is, 'Well, I'll just do a bit of a proof of concept of this.' You know... 'I'm not making the system. I'm not coding the system. I'm just making a little bit of code that does a proof of concept to see what it might look like.' Of course, having done that, you've broken the back of perhaps some of the fear of that side. And then you think, 'Well, actually, it becomes easy.' Various techniques for paper if you're writing things; I've even heard somebody suggest typing with everything in italics

because it makes you think that it's not final. Handwriting... paper often does this as well. Things that just make you feel that you can get on with it. So, anything, because *doing something is more important than doing nothing*. Well, again, there are exceptions to this, but often (inaud.) making progress. That something – and we talked about busywork – might be busytasks

that are related to the whole. So, it might be you've got your impasse; you feel stuck; you do something. It's a busytask; it's a preparatory task; it's an information-seeking task; it's a gathering task; it's a trying-something-out task, but that by doing it you actually will make it easier to achieve the end. I've put a question mark with  this as I've written the thing. Sometimes you do need to force yourself. Now, often trying to

– the whole point about impasse is often that you've forced yourself and you're not making any progress; you're not getting anywhere. Bang. So, actually, forcing yourself is usually a bad idea, but sometimes it can help. So, again partly this is it'll depend on the kind of task. Partly it'll depend on your personality, how you work. But sometimes if you can know you have to do things to a schedule, to a deadline, it can help. Two of them that I've experienced personally – one was a year ago.

I did NaNoWriMo, which is the National Novel Writing Month. November – you commit yourself to write 50,000 words in a month. So, it's about just under 2,000 words a day. And you just get on with it – you just know you have to write those words down, and you write them. Again, there's a sense of lowering commitment  here because you just have to write words, you write them; you're expecting that you're going to have to edit them later;

commitment reduction. I mean, not everybody achieves all of them, and I've signed up again this year, and for various reasons I couldn't do it, so it's not  that it works, these things work all the time. Another one from my personal experience is some years ago I used to have to every second month, there was a six-issue-a-year ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, and I was writing the education column. And it was 850 words six times a year.

And I would come to the deadline day every time, and I wouldn't have thought about it. And I'd think, 'Oh my goodness, I've got this due today.' I would usually go for a walk or do something like that, just do some activity, and a few things would just start to shuffle into my brain, and then I'd go and I'd write. But I had to write; I knew I had to write, and some were better than others. But the discipline of writing 850 words – and it couldn't be more

as well; it had to fit exactly onto one page – trained me such a lot. In general, deadlines can be a really bad thing – we  all hate deadlines. But the ones that don't whizz by, like you've heard about – they loom up thing. But sometimes they can help; so, sometimes *creating deadlines can help you*. Or putting something off until – you know – so there's a task and you know, and this is particularly for these things which are emotionally hard to

do, but actually not that hard, really – what you do is you say, 'I know I've got to do it by that date. It's going to take so long,' and actually schedule it back from that day. Don't try and do it up-front; sometimes it's good to do things up-front, get them out of the way. But if it's going to be one of these, you're going to waste your time doing it – putting it off, because when you get to that deadline, boy often do you produce! Again, it depends on your personality, but I often find that. So, deadlines may help; they might not, and you  have to understand a bit the kinds of the tasks,

the kind of way that you react to those things.  Some people just freeze with a deadline. Another thing works for *some* people – and this... works in different ways for me; so, it'll be different and it works differently for different people, but is in various ways *committing to others* or actually *committing* – some people who are very much wanting to be parts of social circles – there's a lot of things that work this way, where you actually say how you're getting on,

and other people can see, and you use that accountability to others as a way of helping to force yourself. Sometimes I use guilt – again, it varies on your personality; if I want to get something done, I don't make myself accountable to others, but I make it that I feel I need to do it in order to help the other person or something like that. So, again, *think about yourself and what drives you*. Some years ago, I was walking around  Wales, a thousand miles – it took me a few months.

Halfway around, by a period of about three weeks, where it was awful; I'd wake  up in the morning; I'd hurt; I felt like I had no mental strength whatsoever.  There was no toughing through; there was no toughness. And the one thing that kept me going was  that I had said I was going to do it. Now, it wasn't that I was going to be embarrassed that people would think I'd fail,

but I had made the statement I was going to do it to myself; I had committed myself to do it, and I continued. Incredibly powerful, that sense of commitment. Having talked about forcing things, I want to come on to what I feel is probably, in terms of this time-managing, planning, organizing creativity, probably the most important principle there is;

and – but I'm not very good at remembering letters, so I'm going to read them: It's 'DWYFL'. And depending on the nature of your language, you might want to insert extra characters into here as well. But I'll let you add those at  your convenience. So, 'DWYFL' – what's that? Do What You Feel Like. So, but by that I don't mean sleep all day or watch the television. So, I don't mean that, but I mean *within your creative work practice*...

*Do the thing that comes to you.* So, remembering that video of me getting up in the morning; I wake up in the morning, and what's tootling around  my head is about time-managing creativity. Now, you could imagine one way of planning things  is to say, 'What are all my tasks? Which are the most important ones? Well, I obviously need to do that one first and then that one and then that one. I wake up in the morning and think, "Well, today I'm supposed to be doing X." And I get on with it.'

Now, I might perhaps write down my thoughts  about time-managing creativity, so I do that first stage – writing them down – so I don't forget them. But then I get on with the thing I'm 'supposed' to be doing. Am I going to do it well?  What's on your *heart* is where you'll be *most productive*. So, if you wake up in the morning  and something is buzzing around your head, *get on with it*. Now, that's not always possible.

There are times and there are lots of times in my life where that doesn't work. There's something; there's a deadline looming and you have to do the other job; so, it's not just always possible, but it's – when you can, this is incredibly *powerful*. The thing that is exciting you, that's grabbing you, you're going to be most productive doing that. So, the question is: 'Can you organize your time to  allow you to do what you feel like?' Now, some of the things we've been talking about are explicitly about this – this clearing space.

If you can get rid of all those little noisy tasks – you know – all the odd emails and everything like that, if you can clear those out of the way, perhaps do that especially on – again, it varies on yourself, this (inaud.) but particularly if you can do them, perhaps say, 'I only do these at the end of the day. I only do these on a Monday,' or not even – it might not be that regular; *just get things out of the way* so there aren't too many of these things looming that you have to do this day, because you've done those.

And then, for the bigger tasks, have a number  of them that are sitting there. Not to try and shuffle and do a little one of this and a little bit of that... but rather than saying, 'I've got these three tasks. I'll do this one and then I'll do that one and do that one,' to say, 'I've got these three. When you wake up in the morning, which one is grabbing you? Do it.' Now if none of them are grabbing you, then you can go to your default option, whichever one happens to be sitting first.

But if something is taking your  heart and you possibly can, *get on and do it*.