Clutter in the age of design thinking

The mind is a cluttered up place where stray thoughts, half-remembered insults and little bubbles of happiness jostle for space. A gossamer thin veil of forgetfulness covers this randomness. Lately I’ve wondered if it is possible to bring some order to it with new age design thinking.

A recent article said that design is at the core of commercial successes. Terms like user-centric, informed design rattled around in my already cluttered mind and I figured that it was time I thought about bringing order to the untidiness. The first to go out would be the half-remembered the insults. Surprisingly, when I did a deep dive and turned some of them over to look under all I found was a little bit of myself trapped in there struggling to get out. Like the time a parent insulted me in front of a dear friend. I freed the hurt and watched it fly away dragging a strange little tail behind it. Hmmm…wonder if that was informed design!

I found that the stray thoughts had piled up and sitting in a corner weighing down more important things like, the name of the cute guy who had sworn that he would never get over his crush for me as long as he lived! I took a shovel to the stray pile. Broken down like that some of them just disappeared into nothingness, some of them which were weighing down my sense of self-worth on closer look vanished into thin air ….can’t believe that they had contributed to so many bad dreams over the years. This design thinking thing was quite amazing, my pixie voice squeaked into my head.

The bubbles of happy thoughts I decided needed no re-touching or re-designing. The times when I had keeled over with laughter at silly jokes and incidents which didn’t mean anything to anyone except to me and to those who had been in that laughter zone deserved to be pushed to the top of the pile. Maybe that’s what informed design meant. It informed me that a sliver of a happy thought was balanced precariously on top of the clutter and that’s where it would stay. Hey, I was getting good at it!!

I had poked around for so long that the gossamer thin veil was now in shreds. Good…because it was just an inconvenience that had far outlived its purpose. It had been there because growing up I needed to be sheltered. Now I was ready to re-design and no veils were needed. I shook out the dust from all those thoughts and memories, held them up to the light and realized that what I had been keeping a tight lid on all these years was just some ghosts. Now that I had de-fanged them the clutter was gone. For good.

Design thinking was helping me to de-risk development. Who said that I didn’t understand management terms!!