Expand Your Philosophy: Make The Crappy Set
Short principles for long-term clarity—and occasional epiphanies.
How can questioning, context, and simplicity fuel creative design and problem-solving?
“Creation is an expression of our knowledge and emotions in concert with our understanding about how they relate to each other. ”
Human memory has a great feature where it stores things we learn relative to other things we already know. It is a system with the emergent property of comprehension and cohesion of thought. When we are creating something new, there are not always reasonable things on which to anchor our designs. The synthesis of something new may be so tentatively linked or so oddly novel that to relate it in a meaningful way to their forbearing concepts would not make any contextual sense. Instead, what we are left with is a laundry list of questions relating to the shape or “design space” of this new idea. Ultimately, this idea feels very vague as there is nothing to which it is strongly connected. Therefore, creating a simple image of the gestalt and milieu of your design is important to understanding the thing itself.
To remedy the problem of a wide-open design space, a million unanswered questions, and a lack of surety of where to start, you can create a crappy set. That is to say, create a handful of things within the same space that are contextually the same yet hold different content. The purpose of this exercise is that each subsequently created idea provides context to your initial idea garnered by asking questions about how they relate. This is a very messy process; however, the benefit is that it clarifies some principles and charts some of the unknown space in the immediate surroundings of the idea.
I think an example is necessary. If you were creating a new RPG world (Roleplaying Game) you might start with a cool concept you had about “the gods” of this new fantasy world. Instead of fleshing out everything about the mythos before moving on, creating the nations of people who occupy the earth is required to contextualises why the gods are important. Asking questions like “what power do the gods have over the people of the earth?” or “how do the people of each nation worship their gods and what do they get in return?” creates shape and bi-lateral importance of each feature, maybe even creating new ones.
Another example might be that you are designing a business selling a broom that flies (witch-style). If you started by defining everything about your broom you might miss out on how it could be improved to benefit your potential audience. So, getting a rough shape for your witchy audience may have you ask more relational questions like “what job does this broom fulfill in my audience’s daily life?” or “let’s say that this becomes ubiquitous, how does that change their relationships with their friends?”.
As you can see by quite simple examples, answers to these relational questions create shape in the design space that becomes invaluable for building other conceptual pieces of the new mental model. As you answer these questions you learn high leverage information about your system and how things work in conjunction with one another. You begin to create interconnection which then has the capability to create emergent properties. It is as Gall’s Law states: all complex systems that work, evolved from simpler systems that work.
The steps to effective creation and refinement of your crappy set are the following:
Take a novel idea and answer the following question “For this to exist, what might it need to interact with?”
Take one of the components highlighted and flesh it out a little with a little bit of “What If?” and then ask the question “In what ways does this relate to my initial idea?”
Once you have a list, investigate each relation independently and ask more specific questions to flesh out that part of your system.
Once you run out of questions (or energy to answer, which is more likely), add a new component to the system and keep questioning. It is up to you if you test each piece independently or just slowly add them to one big “concept soup”.
Eventually everything will again feel a bit vague because you have generated a lot of extra information. This is totally normal and part of the process. Stand back and look at each piece you have fleshed out. Consolidate the best information and prune the remainder. Give yourself a small break and then do it again. With very few iterations things will look much more interesting than when you started. Although questions will remain, the goal is not to answer them all but instead to pursue creating something of value to the world. Hopefully you can come to have some fun with it.
Reflection Questions:
Imagine I was a writing critic breaking down all the component agents, objects, and locations of my story. If I was to isolate 1 element and view all its relationships, which are the most impactful 20% and which are the least impactful 20%? And why?
Imagine you are a god who has to power to add, subtract, and modify components of a person or thing at will and you want to run an experiment. You have targeted one person/object/place and will alter just one fundamental piece – In light of this change, how do all its relationships change for better or worse?
Songs That Embodies This For Me:
Concrete Closure – Rain City Drive
Alexander Hamilton – Hamilton
Trendsetter – Connor Price, Haviah Mighty
IKIGAI – Airworthy, Todd Tran
Resources You Could Explore:
The Creative Act – Rick Rubin (Amazon)
Bird by Bird - Anne Lamott (Amazon)
The Design of Everyday Things - Don Norman (Amazon)
Think Like a Game Designer – Justin Gary (Amazon)
Want More Recommendations? – See Here
Other Creations: