the creative way

I’ve wondered for a long time about the creative phrase that says “think outside the box” and I’ve decided that it’s rubbish. that the box is there for a reason. that you must respect it for what it is. without the box we don’t have an idea of the boundaries are. you simply cannot think outside of it unless you know where the edges are.

one thing that I’ve said about students, actually lets broaden this to artists, engineers and designers, is that if you tell them they can do anything they want to do they will come back to you days later with nothing. the very idea of “anything” is to broad that absolutely nothing gets done. I’ve seen this happen again and again in all the time I’ve managed projects.

it’s only when you put budgets, deadlines and constraints on a project is when things become interesting. the very problem of sky is the limit is squelched making it possible to put your mind around the thing as a whole thing. “something to work within” in other words.

the box, even if it’s nothing more than the idea of limits, is what allows you to think about the very thing you want to think out side of. when making a new product I will go into the project with a list of requirements. sometimes this is called a MRD (marketing requirements doc) or just a “spec”. it can be simple like “GPS – small, waterproof, rechargeable without having to plug it in. cost is a factor but not for v1.” or “150 experiments to make you a better designer.” from that we know what the next steps are. it could anything from source possible parts to a trip to the book store.”

it’s during this phase when the box is actually defined. you may find a new material to work with, a component that was just released or you may find that what you are trying to make is in fact impossible to make given what you’ve been asked to do. it may cost to much to make, take too long to produce or something that makes it possible isn’t available for some reason (like a part is is too new).

another problem that you may encounter is that the box isn’t interested in you because it’s actually bigger than you envisioned it. when I was working on a streaming video project I was driven by NBC announcement that they had booked 8 BILLION dollars in advertising for the Fall season. I did the numbers game doing what every entrepreneur  does and came up with a number which fueled my excitement for making the project. however, this was a fatal flaw. it was that number I made. and even making the number smaller and smaller I was still dealing with such unbelievable number so much so that nobody believed my project was actually real. not because of the engineering problem, or a bandwidth problem or the staffing problem but because it made too much theoretical money. so what right? Sandhill Road wasn’t interested maybe Horrywoo was. turns out they weren’t either.

this is not to say that thinking outside the box doesn’t always have impossible to go with it. but you really need to understand the box before you venture to the other side. your problem will be that if everyone has an idea of the box so much so that being outside of isn’t even of interest you really need to rethink what you are thinking. if I had to do it over again I would have made a Power Point clone and shipped that instead.