The myth of the messy creative

It is a commonly held belief that being disorganised and messy is the normal state of mind for ‘creative’ people.  As if the compliment of being a magical ‘creative’ type needs to be balanced out by the fact that you might be a bit rubbish at logical, rational organisation. Perhaps the spurious idea of left brain and right brain will get raised in service to the stereotype of a lateral thinking genius that looks at the world a bit differently.... someone with great ideas, but somehow unreliable or that might stumble and bumble their way to something fantastic.

If a ‘creative’ person is messy or disorganised, they are not creative because they are messy, their messiness is a symptom of the same qualities that come with a creative mindset - a restlessness to discover new things, easily bored by conventions, finding joy in experimenting and able to make ‘mistakes’ without fear of being ashamed by failure. These are key qualities for creative thinking (and ones I must admit it took me some time to fully embrace as I came to design with a naturally rational predisposition) but only gets you half way through the process. There is a lot of skill and craft involved between the conception and birth of a design idea and it should be celebrated as such.

Does this scenario sound familiar? A designer has a bomb-site of a desk, files things haphazardly on the server, works very last minute to deadlines, but the design ideas are insightful, clever and brilliant....but not fully formed or perhaps even feasible. Almost inevitably, these designers might have excellent ideas, but have fallen into the trap of placing ideas on a pedestal; thinking that world class design is about coming up with new and amazing ideas and that the parts that follow are not so interesting. After all, these stages are where the compromises happen; where budgets are squeezed and clients dilute ideas into something weaker and more ‘normal’. But to my mind (and I appreciate that this is not a view shared by all) this is the same mistake as being messy. Messiness equates to “I can’t be bothered” because you think it isn’t worth the effort to try and apply order to things because they will only return back to chaos again later..........nothing ever comes from not putting the effort in to make things as good as they can be.
 
I believe that the most creative people (and certainly the most interesting and successful) seek to be in full control of their creative output and this is even more important for those involved in design, where creativity is tied to function and problem solving. To design something is to look around the world and attempt to create something new in response to a perceived need. We coalesce ideas and materials together in order to illicit a response from our audience. This can only be done successfully by exerting control over all of the stages involved, which takes rigour and discipline on top of the confidence to spark an idea in the first place.

But what about the ‘happy accident’ you might say? Of two random things coming together on your desk/ desktop and sparking off something entirely new and fantastic in your head? Well, actually, shock horror, this happens whether you are messy or not, it is part of the creative mindset that we play with associations and stumble across combinations we had not thought of.  And why wait to have happy accidents anyway? This seems a romantic notion at best and lazy at worst.....why not consciously play with things and see what happens? Yes, you have to embrace a fluid, relaxed and lateral approach in order to be creative, but you can, and must, do this without resorting to chaos if you want to make this idea a reality. Developing and executing an idea is a craft, not just a job for a technician to execute.

The ‘creative’ should not be thought of as some distinct type of person….there are no such things as ‘ideas’ people and ‘detail’ people - these are just incomplete designers who have focused on parts of the process that most comfortably align with natural personality traits.  There is no magic to either side, perhaps just the requirement to know that you need to be flexible in your approach to different parts of the process. Idea generation requires great confidence in ourselves, to have no qualms about making ‘mistakes’ and to truly understand what it means to play.  Turning this into reality is more of a rational game with rules; it requires the ability to be accurate and decisive, to constantly weigh up the impact of changes against the original design idea and accept (or fight!) compromise but, crucially, is the true art of a designer.

After all, I believe that great design is born from two things: the clarity of a design idea and the integrity of its execution - why would you not aspire to perfect both sides of the design process?