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The art of unlearning

How letting go of the familiar can help product designers become more creative.

Suchithra Sathiyamurthy
UX Collective
6 min readMar 2, 2023

The pursuit of knowledge — challenging the old & embracing the new (‘School of Athens’ by Raphael)

Kids are more imaginative than adults. Not only is this pretty commonly observed, it’s scientifically proven too. In 1968, George Land conducted a longitudinal study where he tested 1600 children’s ability to come up with new and innovative ideas. He initially tested four to five-year-olds and retested them at ten and fifteen years. Results showed that this ability dwindled from a staggering 98% at four to five years to 12% at fifteen years. The same study in adults showed a mere 2%.

Why? Well, as we grow, we become experts in convergent thinking.

Researchers widely debate creativity, but they often recognise originality or novelty as one of its key elements. And this originality is a product designer’s super-weapon. A weapon that’s powerful yet elusive. Similar to Land, there have been other research that show creativity reduces as we go through life. We fixate on finding ‘the right’ answer (a.k.a convergent thinking) and cling to it rather than exploring possibilities. While this doesn’t kill our creativity, it certainly suppresses it.

As product designers, we engage with three elements frequently— standards, patterns, and people.

And for the sake of efficiency…

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by Suchithra Sathiyamurthy

Reflecting on design from the broad and the narrow | Product designer | Dublin | Views are my own

Responses (15)

What are your thoughts?

Although we’re born creative, as we get ‘good at life’, our brains become wired for efficiency.

Excellent article, and I enjoyed the additional information provided about previous studies concerning children vs. adults' ability to innovate or create new concepts/ideas. Where would you put nostalgia in line with an adult's need for the sake of…

2

That's a well written article. Well done! :)

1

world.

Herb Simon (nobel prize) is the person that brought this forward as “Science of the Artificial” in his 1969 book. Ideo branded it nicely, but lost the experimental elements and confounded the main concept.

2