Dreams And Design: Pathway To New Brand Value

Thomson DawsonMarch 27, 20144 min

I remember years ago when my inquisitive 5 year-old daughter was watching me drawing some logo ideas in my Moleskin sketchbook. She asked me what I was drawing and I replied “an idea”.  Then she asked me “where do ideas come from”?  I replied, “They come from inside my head”.  She proceeded to give me a funny face look and then she asked, “How do they get in there Daddy”?

Out of the mouths of babes, a great question indeed – how do they get in there?

For over three decades I have been completely fascinated with ideas and innovation.

Or to put it another way– turning nothing into something. Creative ideas are what have separated human beings from everything else on this planet.  From stone tools to our modern technology, ideas, inspirations, and flashes of insight has been the genesis of every innovation humans have conceived. First it has to be a dream, and then it has to be designed.

Dreaming and designing is the activity that turns nothing into something, bringing new value where there was none before.

Moving ever deeper into the 21st century, we are collectively leaving our industrial age frame of reference and bias and embracing the challenges inherent in the new normal – a global economy now based on ideas.  The shift places a premium on the talent and skill of dreaming and designing. Individuals and organizations must excel at both to thrive in the brave new world.

There’s Nothing New Under The Sun

Everything that is comes from something else that was. While it’s fashionable to proclaim innovate or die, many great innovations are borrowed from other ideas that came before.

Every organization wants to be perceived as innovative in their product development. The truth is many organizations struggle to be innovative in ways that are game-changers for their long-term success. Rather than developing a deeper and richer understanding of what people really care about, many companies innovate around themselves, bringing to market incremental innovation produced within a familiar knowledge base and strict cost structures.

Enlightened organizations are dreaming and designing around life experiences and meanings rather than competitive or functional features and benefits. To do that well, you have to go outside of what you know and look for related patterns from other sources of inspiration. For example, the idea of a printing press came to Gutenberg while he was watching the movements of a wine press. Eureka, humanity forever changed.

Dreaming Is Messy

Organizations that are performance driven and action oriented have a difficult time dreaming. It’s messy and unpredictable. These organizations like to dream within the boundaries of known protocols and past experience.  The premium is placed on what has worked in the past. Of course, the trouble with that line of thinking is nothing from the 20th century is working too well in the 21st.

Imagination is one of the most illusive and mysterious of the human faculties.  When we are dreaming up new ideas, we are playing in the realm of the formless and performance-driven-metrics-obsessed organizations need solid form – tangibility and predictable results. The imagination doesn’t work in strict linear patterns of cause and effect. Ideas are formless thought seeds, the result of unfocused attention and idle daydreaming.

Those organizations that master their collective imaginations and innovate transformative products and businesses have become comfortable with the unformed and the unknown – the messy business of creating value.

Designing Is The Imagination Taking Form

Much has been written about design and design thinking. Breakaway organizations like IDEO have made the principle of design thinking their stock and trade. To quote, author Marty Neumeier in his book Meta Skills: Five Talents for the Robotic Age, “if you are going to innovate, you’re going to have to design”.

Dreaming and designing are two sides of the same coin. Designing brings form to the formless. Designing is the action of dreaming. Designing is about making things and making things better.

The people who will solve the problems facing us today will be dreamers and designers – entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers, artists, educators, philosophers and anyone who is seriously thinking about elevating our collective life experience.

In every activity and human endeavor, the process of design will bring order, simplicity and beauty to the complex problems facing nearly 7 billion human beings living on this small blue dot we call our home.

So where will the big ideas come from that will elevate our human experience? From anyone and anywhere. All of us have the capability to transform our world with our ideas and our visualizations, if only we give ourselves permission to try.

The Blake Project Can Help: The New Product Co-Creation Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

Thomson Dawson

3 comments

  • Alexandra Nicola

    March 28, 2014 at 3:14 am

    Creative ideas come from being different and being influenced by different things. That’s why a change of scenery or activity is recommended from time to time. But that is not something easy for the human resource of major companies. With strict protocols and routines, dreaming outside of the box is hard.

    • Juan

      April 2, 2014 at 3:02 pm

      I agree.

      What would be the fuel of our mission as designers? Dreaming is the unique choice; being surrounded by the imperialism of metrics and blade runners, dreaming is a duty.

      However, dreams (compelling, “misfit” designs, heartbreaking executons) die at the big corporation´s meeting rooms, desolved when big contracts and fear are in the middle.

      That´s it.

  • Roger Nichols

    April 4, 2014 at 9:23 am

    I think new ideas have a tremendous value. If companies just do what they did before they’ll eventually loose what they have to others that innovate. What worked yesterday may not work tomorrow.

    One big thing that non-creatives don’t understand is that creating and designing is a process, and a laborious one at that. New and innovative ideas don’t just appear out of thin air or from the deeper recesses of the mind. They come after deep research, exhausting brainstorming and endless refinement of ideas. Sure initial ideas or dreams do come from what seems like random places and things, but turning those ideas into viable options takes work. “Designing brings form to the formless”.

    Valuable innovation is the combination of dreaming and designing. Great ideas are often simple and easy to understand, making us forget about all the complex work it took to get to that solution.

Comments are closed.

Connect With Us