DESIGN
Unlocking creativity through fresh perspectives
“Thinking” illustration by the author.
It’s often said that creativity is fuelled by diverse experiences. I’ve previously talked about how acquiring new knowledge can allow you to connect the dots in a different way and come up with creative new ideas.
However, it’s not enough just to collect diverse experiences — you also need to look at those experiences through your own personal lens and see them in a unique way.
This brings me to the concept of “vuja de” as discussed by the comedian George Carlin.
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It’s the opposite of “deja vu”, which is where you see new things that feel inexplicably familiar. “Vuja de” is about looking at familiar things in a new light.
As Albert Einstein said: “Creativity is seeing what everyone else has seen, and thinking what no one else has thought.”
I have an academic background in ethnography, so I’ve been trained to observe the world and see what nobody else has spotted.
Ethnographers don’t generally have a set of ready-made research instruments — instead the ethnographers themselves are the research instruments, calibrated through years of theoretical training and experience. Learning to do ethnography really means learning to see in a certain way and question things that others take for granted.
My favourite quote about ethnography is by Diana Forsyth, who said “An ethnographer is not a tape recorder”. Essentially what she meant is that you can’t just look and see what is out there in the world and think that you understand it. This is not a scientific discipline involving objective measurements that can be replicated… it’s relative, not positive.
Ethnography is a collision of what is out there and what is in here, inside the mind of the ethnographer. There’s no escape from the fact that everything you see is always filtered through your own perspective. “Wherever you go, there you are”, as the old adage says.
It’s the same sort of process as diagnosing a patient — anyone could take the patient’s temperature and run some tests, but they wouldn’t necessarily understand what was wrong. It takes the knowledge and experience of a skilled physician, firstly to know what tests to run and what questions to ask, then secondly to look at that data and be able to diagnose the disease.
A skilled ethnographer doesn’t just observe what’s going on — she creates an understanding of the situation at the point where her expertise and knowledge collide with whatever she’s observing.
Creativity is essentially the same — a thousand people can look at the same thing but maybe only one person will see it in a particular way. It’s not so much about this new piece of knowledge as it is about how the new knowledge relates to their other pre-existing knowledge and skill in an interpretative sense.
It’s like that story about Picasso sitting in the park, when a woman recognises him and asks him to draw her portrait. He sketches for a few minutes, then hands her the sheet of paper and says she owes him 5000 francs. The woman is outraged and says how is that reasonable when the portrait only took him five minutes? “No, madam”, says Picasso, “it took me my entire life”.
It may be the case that one specific thing sparks a creative idea, but that creativity only arises in the context of the knowledge and skill gathered over an entire lifetime.
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Graphic designer Paula Scher, when talking about the famous Citi logo, explained that she designed it in literally a second… or more precisely “a second and thirty four years”.
How to inspire “vuja de”
So, how do you encourage yourself to see the world differently?
Reject the default. The first idea you think of is rarely the best. This is called the Einstellung effect and essentially it suggests that people can be predisposed to certain approaches even if better solutions exist.Be prolific. Your odds of coming up with that original innovative idea are increased if you come up with a greater number of ideas. Einstein published 272 scientific articles and only four of them were ground-breaking.Diversify. The more varied your knowledge base, the more chance you have of making creative connections. For example, research has found that fashion companies are more creative if their directors have had experience of working abroad.Procrastinate. Give your brain time to be open to thoughts. Allow ideas to incubate and develop, ideally by distracting yourself with an undemanding task.Be an experimental innovator. According to David Galenson, you don’t have to be a conceptual genius who forms new ideas at a young age. You can equally be an experimentalist who works on a basis of trial and error to produce creative breakthroughs later in life. Sixty percent of Cézanne’s most famous works were completed after his fiftieth birthday, and Frank Lloyd Wright designed Fallingwater when he was seventy.
The fact is, nothing is entirely original. We create by taking the stuff we already know and recombining it into something new. The more diverse our knowledge is, the more we think and experiment and produce, the more likely we are to come up with something wonderfully creative.
But at the end of the day, it all depends on your own ability to not just collect knowledge, but also mix it together and make it into something new and fascinating. In essence, you have to deeply grok your area of expertise and understand its limits in order to go beyond them.
The “vuja de” mindset was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
