D&I Debates at CSM; intuition

• Intro:
Art director at INT Works

• What's the difference?
For me, rationality is about looking outwards to make decisions.
You assess a given situation and get all the data you have available, and try to make an informed decision based on that.

Intuition on the other hand, is about looking inwards. You decide based on what feels right.
So, where does that feeling come from?

• Experience
You are a product of you own experiences. Whether is within design, work, or just life generally. When presented with a new situation or problem, your immediate feeling toward that situation will be formed from your experiences, all layering on top of each other.

• Unique
Everyone has been through their own unique problems and situations, and will have developed their own set of opinions and biases based on this. By listening to your intuition and these biases, you are likely to develop a response that is unique to you. If you can direct this toward a design solution, then you'll have a totally unique, creative and one of a kind solution. And as a designer, what are clients paying you for?

• Heuristics
A heuristic is a personal bias. A shortcut you use in order to solve a problem more quickly. These may be logical, illogical or just plain crazy, but they're little hacks that work for you based on your cumulative experiences. Let's talk about those for a moment.

Example: If I'm designing an identity that needs to feel youthful, I might initially begin using a bold, pop colour palette. It's just somewhere I'd start. In my experience, I equate youth with vibrancy. Thats a heuristic.

This raises two points.

I'd argue that graphic design has lost its value. Clients seem less willing to allow a designer a luxurious timeline in which to effectively explore all possibilities, e.g., take a rational approach. Developing heuristics allows us to take shortcuts which allow us to do an effective job in the short time allowed.

Secondly, it's a great excuse to live an interesting, adventurous exciting life! The more experiences you expose yourself to, the more likely you are to develop truly unique biases, and therefor have a genuinely unique and creative approach to a project, being able to more skilfully avoid clichés. Get out there!

This leads me on to the next point:
• Serendipity
By being open, and allowing experiences to take you in directions you might never go, you open yourself up to serendipity, or 'happy accidents'. The un-plannable process where by circumstances cause seemingly unrelated references to clash head-on and create something new and relevant. I want to give you an example of this:

Peter Saville—power, corruption and lies.
Thinking that he wanted a picture of a Machiavellian despot, Saville came across a flower painting by Henri Fountain-Latour. Apparently not at all suited to the theme, the card prompted the revelation that power is best illustrated by the trappings of wealth"

• Tools for function
But this raises an important point. Let's talk about that example for a moment.
Intuition lead him to spot the image, and it felt right.
But then what happened? He retro fitted it. This is a rational process.
He looked at the information available to him—in this case, the title and concept of the album, and retrofitted the image to the problem.
He used rationality to validate his initially intuitive choice.

• Design process
This is a diagram of my design process (a very simplified process)

• This is where client presentations happen

• Lets look at the first parts of the problem. This is a more rational problem. In order to develop a suitable brief, we really have to look at all the data available to us in order to define our creative territories. If we did this by feel alone, we could potentially be way off and miss the brief. Many ties business problems are things we have never encountered before, so are unable to address these problems using our intuition.

Your brief becomes the marker post for what happens next, and gets yourself and you client on the same page, and one that you can both understand.
It's a tool to help you to form the concept and art direction.

• But, if we continue to lead with rationality in the creative exploration stage, we're likely to fail. Here's why:
Rationality is based on external data sets and objectivity. It's about the law of averages, or optimums. It's logical. Your territory and limits are based on what other people are doing, and you react to this to make a decision. But people are not logical. They do not respond in rational ways. People are complex and emotional and layered.

• Pictures of irrational people

• Having said that, you must refer back to your brief as a marker post, as your key to post rationalising, or evaluating your designs.
By using your brief (or strategy, depending on how you operate) as your key, you should be able to help your client understand why your design works or does;t work. If you go in and just say 'it feels right' 9 times out of ten, you'll get laughed out of the office.

• Communicate
In the end, the job of the design is to communicate. No one will see your process, or be aware of it, so any way to get there is just fine—there is no right or wrong way. But there are politics, and there are people that hold the purse strings that are not creative. But at the same time, you're selling a service, and in order to get them to buy it, you need to be able to explain away all of their doubts.