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How to learn a designer’s problem-solving mindset with doodling

June Kang
UX Collective
Published in
5 min readMar 15, 2019
Image from Doodle Thinking

“What it is, isn’t really what it is.”

It’s safe to say customers and audiences are never satisfied with conventional solutions. We cannot deny the need for innovation and we probably know we always need to reframe the right problems in a creative way. Customers look for newer, faster, and more affordable options all the time and start-ups continue to raise the standard with innovative solutions.

With challenges constantly coming up, an ability to embrace ambiguity and design a better experience with uncertainty can help you solve a problem that matters to people. That’s where a creative problem-solving mindset can play a huge role. This mindset can help them navigate ambiguity and get to a place that’s both unusual and better. Creative solutions may sometimes be simple ideas that rethink conventional solutions. Sometimes, they could even be a sophisticated interactive experience using AR, VR, Machine Learning and Advanced UI.

“Anyone can approach the world like a designer. To think like a designer requires dreaming up wild ideas, taking time to tinker and test, and being willing to fail early and often. The designer’s mindset embraces empathy, optimism, iteration, creativity, and ambiguity.” — IDEO Design Thinking

The essence of adopting a problem-solving mindset is to remain open and exploratory in questioning the status quo, and more importantly, not to be afraid to really think about the whole idea of ambiguity itself. At this point, you’re probably puzzled by how doodling, ambiguity, and creativity are connected?

∑Illustration by the author

How can Doodle Thinking be of any help to a designer’s problem-solving mindset?

Of course, doodling is a universal language, so no one owns it. Although it’s nothing special, I have to talk about it in a serious matter because it has been underutilized.

“…doodling can help people stay focused, grasp new concepts and retain information. A blank page

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Written by June Kang

A Dreamer with a Problem-Solving Mindset: Product Designer, Faculty, Mentor, & Children’s Book Author based in New York. juneish.com

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