Thinking Different

How I learned to think differently.

It never was a switch for me. I didn’t one day see Apple’s ad campaign and immediately start to think differently. No— it required learning, playing and testing first.

I didn’t notice it at first either. It was a very gradual approach to a new way of thinking.

It began with small interconnected patterns; the way I would organize my CSS would affect the way I would design a page. The way I would design a page changed the way I asked questions. Together I had found a new way of designing to a problem— and it never started with a solution.

That was the first big shift I noticed. If someone presented me with a problem, I wouldn’t stop and immediately prototype solutions like I had before. Instead I was asking more and more questions. I had enough experience to know that most of the time, what they were trying to solve wasn’t the real problem.

It required learning something new— web development in my case. As I was learning, I didn’t expect it to so gratuitously affect my ideas. That seems to be the true nature of learning— additional information to help you make improved decisions. That’s what being new to something again does for you.

It also taught me that playing is experience. Finding ways to put to practice what I was learning became part of the learning process. It required experimenting, playing with others, and in all those roles absorbing new ways of doing things. Some people approached web design completely different. I would try their way, adapt or adopt it into my own practice, and continue on my way. Each step a block, and each block a small shift in prespective.