This week I’ve been writing about how artists, engineers (and other humans) build up a professional palette of techniques and forms from which they can develop new ideas. These are the colours they paint with
Having assembled our paint set, this palette lends itself well to a reliable technique for unlocking thinking.
What people tell me time and again in workshops is that it isn’t having the first idea that they struggle with. It’s coming up with the second. Or having a new idea when the first one gets rejected. That’s when thinking becomes blocked. (There’s reasons for this blocking, which we can explore in another post).
That’s when I suggest systematically using the colours in your palette.
If we were using a real paint palette, it would simply involve doing a quick sketch with the red paint, then the orange, then the blue, say. A quick doodle to see what the thing could look like in each of these colours.
For a structural engineer designing a span: what would this look like if it were a simple beam?
A cantilever?
An arch?
A truss?
Or what would the structure look like made from stone?
Timber?
Concrete?
Steel?
Each material and form has its own affordances — what you can and can’t do with it.
If you know your colours, the cognitive load of doing five two-minute sketches is low. And that small effort can unlock the second idea. And it allows you to see your first idea in context — as the first in a family of possibilities.