One of the most important things to remember when exploring problems or design spaces is that you shouldn’t fall in love with your first idea.

 

There’s a lot of good that comes out of fully exploring a design space in order to come up with solutions that quite different from each other in order to evaluate them. If we cluster our thinking in just one area or direction, we’ve lost the opportunity to see conflicting or vastly different viewpoints. There are some great design thinking exercises that encourage this type of thorough exploration.

An easy way I’ve found to remind myself not to get hung up on just one train of thought is to draw these simple shapes somewhere that I can see them as I work:

triangle | square | circle

Each of these shapes can be considered a very different viewpoint, angle, appearance, language, history, motion or solution. They are the best way I’ve found to remind myself not to fall into the trap of not fully exploring.

Maybe they’ll help you sometime, too.