Quality during Design
Quality during Design is a production of Deeney Enterprises, LLC. It is a podcast for product designers, engineers, and anyone else who cares about creating high-quality products. In each episode, we explore the principles of quality design, from user-centered thinking to iterative development. We introduce frameworks to make better design decisions and reduce costly re-designs. We explore ways to co-work with cross-functional teams. We also talk to experts in the field about their experiences and insights.
Join host Dianna Deeney in using quality thinking throughout the design process to create products others love, for less. Whether you're a seasoned designer or just starting out, looking to improve your existing designs or start from scratch, Quality during Design is the podcast for you.
Quality during Design
Brighten Your Creative Spark
Ever hit that wall where your creative tank feels bone dry? That moment when you've been grinding away at your projects, head down for so long that when someone asks for innovation, you come up empty? You're not alone.
Creative slumps happen when we get too immersed in our specialized domains. As engineers and designers, we develop expertise through consistent application of familiar tools and techniques. But that same specialization creates mental echo chambers where we recycle the same ideas and follow habitual thought patterns. The result? When innovation is needed most, we feel frustratingly blocked.
The solution lies in cross-pollination – deliberately exposing ourselves to diverse inputs that spark unexpected connections.
This episode explores three strategies to reignite your creative spark:
- scheduling dedicated exploration time through activities
- practicing analogy thinking by mapping structures from unrelated domains to your challenges
- maintaining a cross-pollination journal to capture insights for future reference.
Ready to break through your creative block? Join us for practical techniques to expand your innovative thinking and approach design challenges with fresh perspective. Your next great breakthrough might be waiting in the most unexpected places – you just need to train yourself to look for the connections.
Schedule 90 minutes this week for intentional exploration outside your field, and watch what happens when you allow your mind to wander beyond the boundaries of your expertise.
Visit the podcast blog for more information and links.
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About me
Dianna Deeney is a quality advocate for product development with over 25 years of experience in manufacturing. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, which helps organizations optimize their engineering processes and team performance by promoting the use of reliability and quality methods during design. She offers consulting services for managers and directors, training for engineers through the Quality During Design program, and other practical resources.
We've all been in slumps. It usually comes after those times when we've been doing the daily grind for a long time. We're not looking up much, but getting stuff done. After a while we get tired, worn down, uninspired. We get so immersed in whatever we're doing that when we're finally asked to pull out something creative or do some sort of creative innovation, we're empty. Our tank is empty. Let's talk about ways to brighten our creative spark, cross-pollinating our way to innovation. After this brief introduction.
Speaker 1:Hello and welcome to Quality During Design, the place to use quality thinking to create products. Others love for less. I'm your host, diana Deeney. I'm a senior level quality professional and engineer with over 20 years of experience in manufacturing and design. I consult with businesses and coach individuals and how to apply quality during design to their processes. Listen in and then join us. Visit qualityduringdesigncom. Welcome back to the episode.
Speaker 1:I am back from a family spring break trip. This was something that was scheduled way in advance and it was a sightseeing trip seeing the western part of the United States through a train ride. I wasn't really feeling like I needed a break, but it was something where you know spring break is scheduled so everybody has time to spend together, to go do something if they want to. What happened is I had a great time and I ended up filling my bucket, so to speak, time and I ended up filling my bucket, so to speak, and I hadn't even realized that I needed that break, because when I came back, getting back into work and my contracts and my business, I came back refreshed with new inspiration and bigger ideas. What happened to me is that I was in deep immersion on a certain project and didn't even realize that I needed to sort of step away from it for a while to get refreshed. And I know this happens to you too. We get so immersed in whatever product we're working on or within working in our industry, and we get stuck in our usual patterns, using the same tools and techniques all the time that we start to develop these echo chambers for our own ideas, we start to create trends of habits that we just kind of follow and we're not critically evaluating the ideas that we're coming up with. We're sort of in a slump or in a rut. And then, when we have an opportunity to be creative or are in a rut, and then when we have an opportunity to be creative, we're kind of stuck or we don't have a lot of creativity or we can feel a little bit frustrated that we're not coming up with the sort of ideas that we think we ought to be able to. So really, the question that we're asking ourselves today is how can I reliably inject fresh, innovative thinking into my design process, especially when I feel creatively blocked?
Speaker 1:Stuart Walsh wrote a book just for engineers. It's called Introduction to Creativity and Innovation for Engineers. He was interviewed by the Engineering Management Institute for the Civil Engineering Podcast. I'll link to it in the show notes With all of Stu's experiences and insights.
Speaker 1:There are three things that work consistently for him. One is timing activities in your day. Doing heavy thinking first thing in the morning that's what works for him. Exercising and reading books. When the interviewer asked him what are the things that work the most for him, those are the three things that he listed Timing activities, exercising and reading books and I wholeheartedly agree. I use those three things myself For Stu. He realized at the time of day where he was the most creative and can do his best, work was first thing when he's fresh. For you it might be a different part of the day. Knowing that about ourselves helps us to organize our day so that we can maximize our creativity when we're feeling the most creative. Exercising helps to get our blood moving. Even taking a shower, taking a walk, doing an activity while we're thinking about something, can help us. And then he mentioned reading books.
Speaker 1:All of these things that Stu mentioned have to do with scheduling activities, and I want to take what Stu came up with, which I agree with, to a next step, the next step further, because we want to brighten our creative spark. So let's schedule some dedicated exploration time. This could be travel, like I did with my family on spring break going to museums, signing up to go to conferences conferences that are related to the work topics that you do now, or maybe it's a tangentially related work topic, maybe something that one of your cross-functional teammates would go to. For example, I went to some regulatory conferences when I was working as a product design engineer, or it could be a conference that's just completely different. What we really want to do is to schedule some time to see some new patterns, problems and solutions, so we can start cross-pollinating ideas from other places into our own creative processes. An easy thing to do, which is something that Stu mentioned, was reading books.
Speaker 1:I enjoy reading on my own. Reading with a friend is the most fun, but that doesn't happen often, so I also enjoy listening to podcasts of others who have read the same thing. Lately I've been choosing books based on what podcasters are talking about, just so I can listen in and take a deeper dive into the material. Just so I can listen in and take a deeper dive into the material. I have my own favorite book podcasters for fiction books, for nonfiction books. I can offer some of our previous episodes that included a book review discussion, and they're all books that are related to engineering. I'll link to all of those in the show notes.
Speaker 1:You can also look for author interviews. They provide some deeper insights into why they wrote the book or focus in on one or more aspects of it. Do you have a nonfiction book you're reading or you want to read? Do an internet search on the author and or the book title, or ask ChatGPT or Gemini with this prompt. Find podcast episodes related to this author and book title. Then find podcast episodes where this author was a guest List, all episodes by date published. If there are any, I'm sure they will come up with a list that maybe you can explore to take your book reading to the next level.
Speaker 1:So that was our step number one toward brightening our creative spark, which was scheduling activities, purposely choosing things to explore our world in new ways. So that first step will help us get started. But then there's a One is to just practice analogy thinking. We can ask ourselves how is my challenge that I'm stewing on and trying to figure out? How is that? Like this concept from another field?
Speaker 1:One of my favorite stories was about a potato chip manufacturer. They wanted to make a potato chip that was extra crispy and didn't have as much oil on it, and they were stuck. They had done all the usual things or they wanted to create a new type of potato chip for the consumer that was less greasy. They had to look out of whatever they had been doing for years and outside of their own food manufacturing to come up with a solution. And actually it was a violinist who came up with a solution, somebody that played a musical instrument that was more knowledgeable about sound waves and how that could shake the excess oil off the potato chip to create a crisper chip. That is practicing analogy thinking Combining knowledge about musical instruments and sound waves to a food product to make something different, to do something in a new way. A more structured approach to this kind of thinking could be TRIZ, t-r-i-z, which is Theory of Inventive Thinking. I have another previous episode on TRIZ that I'll link to in the show notes.
Speaker 1:Really, with practicing analogy thinking, you want to map structures and relationships from one domain to another domain, and doing this will often reveal some novel approaches that you otherwise wouldn't have thought of. Back to our topic ways to brighten our creative spark. We've talked about scheduling activities for ourselves that are purposely exposing us to different domains. Another one is practicing analogy thinking, where we're starting to map different domains together to form new ideas. And the last one that we'll talk about today is to keep a cross-pollination journal or a swipe file. Here's the thing We've been out experiencing things and we're thinking about things and making new connections. Now we want to write it down somewhere.
Speaker 1:If we come up with an idea, just jot it down our initial thoughts of how it might relate back to design and the kind of things that we're working on. Even if it's a stretch, take a note of it. What you want in the end is a personal repository of ideas that you can revisit when you're facing a design challenge. I used to have a friend that preferred to do these things in a Word document so that he could do a search on it. You can write it in a physical book, keeping a table of contents in the front to what idea you put where, just as long as you can refer back to it later when you're stuck and you need that creative spark Really. We don't want to just focus on more ideas, but different kinds of ideas, want to just focus on more ideas, but different kinds of ideas. So we started our episode here with a problem of just not having a pool of creativity to pull from, and we talked about three things that we could do. One is to schedule activities. The second thing was for us to practice analogy thinking, and the third was to keep a cross-pollination journal or a swipe file that we can reference later.
Speaker 1:What's today's insight to action? Creativity isn't mystical. It thrives on diverse inputs. So your next great design breakthrough might be waiting in a history book, a nature documentary or a conversation with someone from a completely different profession. So I recommend your action this week is to schedule 90 minutes for intentional, non-design exploration. Pick something from the list that we discussed a museum, a documentary, a walk with observational intent. Go in curious. Don't force connections immediately. Just absorb Afterwards. Spend 15 minutes jotting down anything that caught your attention and one potential, even loose, connection to a design problem you're mauling over. I'd love to hear about your own cross-pollination experiments. What unexpected places have you found design inspiration? Share your experience. Just click the send us a text link. That's at the top of the show notes. And, speaking of show notes, there's also a blog post with extra information and links that you can refer to. I mentioned quite a few during the episode. They'll all be there in the blog post at Quality During Design. This has been a production of Dini Enterprises. Thanks for listening.
