Here's how you can foster innovation in commercial design through effective problem solving.

Here's how I foster innovation in commercial design through effective problem solving: I embrace a user-centered approach, immersing myself in the target audience's needs and pain points to identify opportunities for creative solutions. I encourage wild and ambitious ideas, leveraging brainstorming sessions and collaborative workshops to generate innovative concepts. By reframing challenges as possibilities, I empower my team to think outside the box and explore unconventional solutions. Through rapid prototyping and iterative testing, we refine and validate our designs, incorporating feedback and insights to drive continuous improvement.

Nothing exists in isolation, all solutions are made to answer the needs of users. To be able to design is to start with user and their needs in mind. Only talking to real users would allow you to go deeper and develop a sense of empathy with your users, their needs and how this changes over time. It's not only the starting point to any problem solving, but also a continuous undertaking to keep on top of.

The only way to have a good idea is to have many. Don't get attached to your ideas too quickly. In the early stages, try to go for quantity over quality. Aim for something like fat marker sketches to resist the urge to add detail when doing sketches. The aim in this early stage is to produce as many "out there" ideas as possible. Once you've exhausted all ideas, you can start to pick and choose and narrow ideas to find the best one to prototype and explore further.

The idea is to move fast and test different ideas. There will be a real urge to try and refine details, but it's a trap at this early stage. The more detail you add, the more attach you become to an idea. Resist the urge, stay detached from your ideas, and use the prototyping stage to have the idea take some form, but then get that in front of actual users and listen to get feedback and learn.

Collecting and analyzing feedback is one of the most crucial steps in creative problem solving. Listening and listening really well is a skill that you can develop over time. This is not the time to defend any decisions you made or advocate for a specific idea, seeing what trips users up and what makes them confused will allow you to course correct and save countless hours later in the development lifecycle.

Being able to move quickly and test different ideas are crucial. Look for small signs of things that worked, refine that and keep building the idea up to get you to your ultimate solution. It's important to take the refined ideas back to users, listen and watch intently to see how it addresses previous concerns.