In my job as an engineer and product designer, every day, I have to come up with progressive solutions to keep myself and my employers ahead of the competition. After twenty years and six industries of designing solutions, the process has become second nature... I'm always looking to find those neat solutions that elegantly do the job. Reflecting back now, I realize the solutions finding process is a 'designing' process; you design your solutions. And its a process that is summarized by just four basic steps. So, very quickly, here are the steps, plus a neat method I have 'designed' for remembering the steps. Surprise surprise, it's called 'stride4' Pick any creativity technique book, or for that matter, any personal progress book and you will often find that they break down into these fundamental steps. Step 1. Set your target. ... Write down what you want to achieve, the goal. In project speak it's the 'design specification' In home life speak its basically what you want. The art to it though is defining your 'ultimate' target. for the task at hand. Step 2 Make your 'reality check'. Write down the factors related to the target you have set, the things that are important for achieving your target and the things that can affect how easy it is to achieve your target.. Step 3 'Ideas' Write down, draw or capture some how, any ideas you have along the way. Pick out words in your target and reality checks to focus your imagination onto ideas. Step 4 'Do' the 'effective' action. You have to 'do' 'effective' things to progress. You can theorize and analyze as much as you like in steps 1 2 and 3 but to progress you have to Dooooo. But the thinking time of the set target, reality check and ideas stages played an important part....Amongst your ideas will be ideas or combinations of ideas you can act on, ones which are well founded. Well founded ideas because they take into account your targets and realities. So that's the process and did you spot it, the initials st-r-i-de4 are a way of remembering it. Set Target, Reality check, ideas, and Do Effective action. .... Stride4. Actually the '4' is of powerful significance too but I'll save that for another post. Now what next? Well there are many many ways of running the creative stride4 process, ranging form a one person approach to team approach from highly structured and analytical though to instinctive and gut reaction. And that's just a fraction of it....... Human creativity is a fantastic thing! There are many aspects to it. As stride4.net develops, I will be exploring creativity with you the reader. My planned overall theme is 'design technique' and 'progress by design', but let's see where the discussion takes us. I will be using the stide4 creativity tool to enable us all to tune into the process in the same way. We are on a 'creative journey' along which we 'stride4' to make progress. Let's create a new 'stride4' language of design. My planned topics for the coming weeks and months include: Capture your strides on paper to see your creative journey - mapping sheets and logs for stride4ing on your creative journeys Agile striding by colourful stride4ing The power of the '4' in design and communication of ideas. Your reality and others' reality. Reality check readers' polls... our experiment to see how we view the world differently So ... Mark this space and come back to continue our creative stride4ing journey. And give the Stride4 Set Target, Reality check, ideas, and Do Effective action a go plus leave us comments to share how you have progressed on. Happy Stide4ing ! Have fun! David Field.
