1:47 PM
I just saw this quote in an old Black Belt Jones entry by Matt Jones:

"Innovation isn't something you can incorporate in the design process, it's a result you can notice afterwards."

I couldn't disagree more.

Innovation is a goal that can be approached via one of two paths: 1) Standing on the shoulders of giants ("What's been done right in the past, and how can I improve upon it?") or 2) The road not taken ("What's been done in the past, and how could it be done differently?") Either of these are completely valid design mandates that can lead to innovation, even if it is incremental.

When I was on my high school's Odyssey of the Mind team, our coach always encouraged innovation by asking us to set aside our first solution to any problem and come up with a second, better one. This was innovation via both paths--first standing on the shoulders of giants to get perspective, then hopping off to blaze our own trail. At the time it was incredibly frustrating to set aside a workable solution, but the process was an invaluable education that I still use--though not enough--to this day.

Perhaps Matt meant that innovation can only be measured after the fact; I might be able to buy into that. It's often hard to gauge creative success in the midst of the act, and it usually takes time to gain the neccesary perspective to accurately judge your own work and compare it to that of others.

But that doesn't mean the innovation mandate should be given up as an uselessly ephemeral part of the process. Check out Jonathan Gay's article telling how he went from building Lego ships as a kid to creating Flash--and along the way making two of my favorite old games, Dark Castle and Beyond Dark Castle. The last step in his creative process is "Learn - Take what you learned from building this ship and use it to build a better one next time."

When you can take a process and make it into a cycle, so that past solutions become part of the toolbox you can use in future problems, then you're building the creative momentum where evolution breeds revolution. You've incorporated innovation into the design process.


(Incidentally, I visited the BBJ entry following a link marking it as the first use of the term "lazyweb" (a concept being tracked on the LazyWeb page.) I might be willing to consider it the accidental innovation being espoused were it not for the (tm)s stamped after the word--the creation of the term was a recognized act.)