Practising inefficiency

Me and Sara have appointed the talented designers at Sift Digital to help us re-imagine the Nesta online experience.

They beat a tough pack of contenders on the shortlist, but in the end their experience with digital engagement and their radical ideas in the pitch won through. Fist bumps all round.

Thanks to everyone who sent in a proposal and to those who pitched. And special thanks to Kent Lyons who have done an amazing job over the past 3 years on our main site. They kept us looking good.

But now to the future, and for something totally different…

Next step, daydreaming

There’s a lot of work to do on this project, and the first bit – the overall concept – requires a lot of work, but not in the normal sense.

There’s an assumption that work is just about time spent at your desk. I don’t agree. Squinting at screens and punching keyboards is definitely part of the process, but, I’d argue, the most mechanical and least important bit.

Oliver Burkeman wrote a great piece this weekend – he argued that creative work depends upon a kind of inefficiency, and that daydreaming, instead of being unwork, is actually a critical part of the development process.

If you don’t spend time wandering through your mind mansion, or collecting information that is irrelevant to your line of work, or making lots of tea and talking to random people in the kitchen, then your mind won’t be working ‘inefficiently’ enough.

Practise inefficiency

It’s only be practising inefficiency that ideas start to percolate. If you sit down and try and cram that idea plunger, you’ll hit more resistance and you’ll get less interesting results.

So my advice to anyone out there is: don’t be a desk slave. Daydream, randomise and talk to others – only when you’ve stopped daydreaming should you start punching keys.

Now I’m off to make a coffee.