Many times, it might look like we aren’t doing anything, we might be sitting listening to music and people watching, or we might be just browsing a magazine or design book, but we too, are making milk in our own ways. I know this sounds crazy but hang with me.
Quite a few years back I was at an AAF luncheon to hear a speaker (who I now can’t remember), and a while I don’t remember the main topic of his talk, an illustration he gave has since been a part of my creative life. He talked about how cows have multiple stomachs and that because of this, one of them is always working on making milk. But when we, the average human, walks or drives past a field of cows, we don’t see them doing anything because we can’t see what’s going on inside of them, we just see a “lazy” cow chewing grass. This is how the mind of a designer works.
Cows don’t just sit down in the field and say, “I’m going to make milk now”; they eat the grass or the hay and continue to do so and in the meanwhile their bodies are working hard at making milk. In this analogy, us creatives are the cow, our research and the information we take in is the grass, our brain is the stomach, and the our ideas are the milk.
Here’s how it works:
Find Something to “Eat”
Tthe reason I love this concept is because the way a creative, problem-solving brain works is hard to manage at times. Something that I don’t know if many designers grasp is this idea that you have to fill your mental library with many, many ideas and inspirations before you will be able to go back in there and check out something useful for the problem at hand. Just as a cow can’t make milk, you can’t make ideas without inspiration.
Now basically this means, find something that will feed your brain. Whether or not we are currently tackling a project, we need to remember to “eat”.
Just as a cow needs to eat to produce [milk], designers and creatives need to consume inspiration to produce ideas.
It could be stacks of fashion magazines, design books, comics, graphic novels, classic movies, pop music, poetry or fiction literature, but you need to feed your brain’s hunger for inspiring content. You can’t make milk unless you have something to make it out of.
Give it Time to “Digest”
Don’t just expect for good ideas to come immediately after you’ve “eaten”. Remember that making milk (i.e. coming up with ideas) isn’t something that happens on demand. If you’re not in the midst of your process, it’s likely that your’re going to be making milk to try to solve your problems.
Give your inspiration time to soak in, to absorb into your mind, and then you’ll have what you need to come up with great ideas.
Make Milk
This is the easy part, making milk is not actually something you do, it’s just something that will happen naturally.
When you are hitting a wall creatively, taking the time to stop working on whatever you’re working on and take a break gives your brain a rest.
Some of the best ideas happen when you don’t expect them to. It is when you are hanging out with your kids and all of a sudden you get a great idea. This happens because you’ve fed your brain and gave it a chance to digest and rest and your brain found answers and ideas on its own (mostly).
So give it a try and let me know if it works for you. And the next time your boss comes to your desk and you’re “just” looking at design books, assure him that you’re coming up with ideas, he just can’t see it happening, just like a cow making milk….
Design is a wonderful world, I hope you’ll join me here. Because design matters.