Then I go home. Eventually either I’ll be in the shower, looking but not finding an article of clothing that I’m looking for, or attempting to fall asleep and then I get the hit. BAM it all comes at once.

If I don’t get the hit, then I start “doodling” in illustrator. Really, I’m just trying things on for size, and somehow the pieces all just fall together. The hit happens mid-design, I scrap what I’m doing, and go w/ what I almost can see that I have in my mind and then widdle it until its perfect. Then I throw it to the wolves of people who know I won’t cry when they tear my design to shreds, and then I widdle some more and eventually – I’m satisfied enough to send to someone.

And they’re usually surprised that it only took 2 or 3 days… if the world is working normally. Sometimes I get thrown into some crazy timewarp where nothing creative happens and then… well. Then I need the crap scared out of me by a deadline. That’ll get the creative juices flowing *cough*

What did they do when they study was completed? All those people had to stop telecommuting and went back to their prior work schedule.

My English teachers hated this. So do my bosses…hmmmm…

[...] in the industry. I am also curious as to how their work flow is. We already know that they let Ryan lounge around and play ping pong all the time. I have to imagine it isn’t strictly following the previous [...]

Strangely, this also works for my writing. I had one page titled “Can [protagonist] jump the span from [one thing to another]?” After filling it up with physics equations, I scribbled at the bottom: “No”, and then pulled out another blank sheet to figure out what to do with the character.

My solution is to always be working on several different tasks at once. I’ve developed this as much out of neccessity as out of choice, as generally the nature of development won’t allow you to focus on just one task if your life depended on it. There’s always someone coming by your cube or emailing you to take a look at something, or a meeting midday on an unrelated topic, or a discussion over lunch.

I used to just try and stay really late to work after everyone had left, but my resolution this new year was to leave earlier and just find a way to pack all that work into the day more effectively.

This whole process is pretty similar to Ryan’s and Chris’s, except I’m trying to squeeze more productivity out of the day by letting those ideas percolate while I’m implementing, attending meetings, or other work that doesn’t take 100% brain power. I also agree with Chris that sleeping on something will often allow things to fall into place. I first noticed this when playing Guitar Hero. Just by virtue of sleeping once after learning a song, I’d always be much better at it than I would be if I just left and came back for awhile.

In general I find juggling tasks to be a great way to solve any problem and avoid burnout or blockage. I play multiple games at once, read multiple books at once, and generally always try to make sure that I have something else to focus on when I start to hit diminishing returns on my current task.

Mike
mikedarga.blogspot.com

As someone coming out of college, I’ve spent a strange amount of time thinking about how I come to my best creative thinking. For me, I try to surround myself with things that open my thought process. For me it’s chill music (anything from meditation music to reggae), sunshine (windows open if possible), cooking (this opens up creativity quite well if you’re someone who loathes cookbooks and trusts their own experimentation), and finally sleeping on the problem.

Just before sleeping is when things tend to come together. I try to cut down the amount of speaking that I do over the course of the day. I’ve found that when I’m really working hard to solve a creative problem or working on art, it’s very difficult to switch between speaking and thinking creatively (I suspect that they use very separate areas of the brain).

My idiom would have to be that I have to work under the pressure of a deadline. Even if that deadline is self imposed. I started my career as a radio news writer and anchor with 1/2 hour deadlines during the busiest times of the day. I think that molded me to work the way I do. It does irritate some of the people around me because they like to feel prepared. My best work, however, is done under pressure.

Don’t get me wrong. I go through a lot of the phases you outline. I do a lot of thinking, plotting, planning. But the most fun to me is beating that deadline and getting something of quality done.

idea: an idea is information which has an undetermined value

design: a process which develops value from an idea

The work which is needed to do the design part to create a value depends too much on the idea to be easily identified. But in large it is split between the to poles of being able to execute the design from start to finish without needing communication and needing to communicate through the whole process. I might go far enough to say that the first pole of no communication is probably not what I would call design either.

I have derived my own idiom through about 6 years of working as a software designer, but I actually borrowed the term for it from Chris Crawford (the game designer). He calls it “Letting the ideas percolate”.

You spend about a day or two really studying the problem you are trying to solve, come at it from a dozen different angles, consider all the things you are trying to achieve (ease of use, performance, modularity, customisability etc), come up with a dozen different approaches but don’t actually commit to anything or throw out any ideas. Then after you’ve had an intense brainstorm, you just stop thinking about it (completely), and put it aside for a day or two (or if its really tricky, like the architecture for the next version’s key feature, a week or two). There’s always a dozen other things that need to be worked on in parallel, so that’s never usually a problem.

During the intervening time, after sleeping on it, your subconscious chews on it for you, without you having to think about it. Natural intuition kicks in and just having the ideas in the back of your brain is enough for the hard work to be done for you.

Then, when you come back to it, fresh, the right idea just “pops into your head”. The subconscious mind and intuition eliminates most of the incompatible ideas for you, and often will come up with a new synthesis that sort of makes it all fit. What it really comes down to is trusting your intuition, and changing your workflow to accommodate it.

This actually sounds a lot like your process too, just a different way of approaching it.