Online Product Design Education: Exploring Unknown Unknowns
“I’m always encouraging my students to aim for 100 ideas,” says Jamer Hunt. “You may think that there are only two or three good ideas for one single opportunity, but I say try for 100.”
When you start generating ideas, you often reach a point of frustration where you think there’s nothing else to think about. When you reach this point, you have to just keep moving forward.
“Just keep sketching,” encourages Jamer. “You have to keep iterating your ideas because eventually, you’ll reach ideas you didn’t know you had.”
Product Design
This is when things start getting exciting. This is when design really takes off. I like to refer to this as the unknown unknowns. These are the things that we don’t know we don’t know. This is the real magic of design. Most design falls under the unknown unknowns. For example, how can we take this vacuum cleaner and improve it by 3%? How do we take this experience on an airline and improve it by 3%?
Product Design Education
The unknown unknowns are those breakthrough ideas that really transform a way of designing into a way of creating new products. However, you don’t get there on your first, second, or third ideas. You have to push through to your 20th, your 30th, your 40th, and your 100th ideas. This is when you really put stress on your own sense of what you know. This is where you push yourself beyond your comfort zone into an area where the things in your head come forward. These are the things you aren’t prepared for and the things you don’t anticipate.
This is when the magic starts to happen.
