July 12, 2011

According to Roger Martin, dean of University of Toronto's Rotman School and author of several and articles on design-driven innovation, "business people don't just need to understand designers, they need to become designers."

That's a tall order, because designers utilize a specific set of creative skills—observing, ideating, prototyping—to solve wicked problems. But David Sherwin, an award winning Senior Interaction Designer at frog design, has tackled the challenge head-on with a terrific skills-building book entitled Creative Workshop: 80 Challenges to Sharpen Your Design Skills.

I spent a few hours not just pouring over the book, which is both a beautiful and functional piece of design itself, but also tackling several of the challenges. The 80 challenges cover seven major areas: Foundation, Interpretation, Execution, Innovation, Observation, Instruction, and Materiality. Each area calls up a wide variety of applications, or specific target skills: From typography, storyboarding, interactive media, packaging, branding and identity design to advertising, retail space design, research, video, and motion graphics.

Whatever skill you wish to practice, there's a well crafted challenge designed to push you to the limits of your creativity. Each exercise has a "timebox"—a resource limitation that mirrors the real world of business, which is always time-constrained. Each exercise contains a basic and advanced assignment, so that even experienced designers benefit.

By completing a few of the challenges, I not only renewed my respect for great design, but learned a few things about my own creative capacity.

Big idea:

Creative Workshop isn't a highly conceptual book, so there's no "big idea" other than making the point that becoming creative, or more creative as the case may be, is like building any other skill: It takes practice. And like building new muscle, you need to surprise yourself with new challenges that fire up new neural connections. That this is a hands-on book is quite refreshing.

Key takeaways:

Sherwin's intent wasn't lost on me, and I took away the insights he set out to have practitioners realize. Here are few that stuck with me.

• Enlightened trial and error is a the best way to seek out a great solution

• Process is more important than the final product, but still just means to the end

• Rote repetition is necessary, but not nearly sufficient, to master creative skills

• Your creative instincts and intuition improves greatly by solving widely divergent problems with a disciplined approach

• Creativity thrives under proper constraints

• Embracing failure builds confidence in your creative ability

Liked most:

Not only are the 80 creative challenges well thought out, but they are road-tested. Each challenge in the book was given to Sherwin's students in 2009 through seminars delivered at the Creative Academy at Seattle Central Community College and as a class held at Worktank Brand Storytellers. Their solutions are included following each challenge, delivered through beautiful photography and accompanied by detailed explanations. The creative solutions are, in a word, brilliant. At the same time, they are confidence-building—just knowing that every challenge has been tackled successfully gets both your creative and competitive juices flowing.

Best for:

Anyone and everyone who feels they can't be creative when faced with a time crunch.

What people are saying:

"I've been around for awhile, and have stacks of books claiming to spark design skills and creative thinking. Most end up in the back corner of the shelf, never living up to their promise. I'm impressed, and happy to say this book is a different breed." Scott Berkun, author of The Myths of Innovation

Related Topics

• Innovation

Related keywords

Matthew E. May, Article, guru review, business books, David Sherwin

Join the conversation ( 1 )

• NAtrekker 10 months ago

  

  Hi, I totally agree, I think the more an entrepreneur understands his business (in every way, including the design process) all the better. It makes for better interaction with the designer and can really improve the results of what is being created. I liked this blog so much, I shared it on my blog: www.natrekker.com. Thanks for sharing! I post a lot of content related to entrepreneurship and start-ups in the U.S and Mexico. I hope you'll check it out. Best, Sarah