Keep A Mood Board
“All these things are just here as, like, mood board for tools for you guys to make your own...”
— Virgil Abloh’s fantastic lecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design
As busy professionals, it’s easy to pass over a statement like Abloh’s as “designer speak,” and disregard it flippantly. “A ‘mood board’? Sounds like something a teenager might make…”
Dismiss “designer speak” at your own peril. More than we realize, the inputs to our lives drive the outputs of our thinking. Invert the statement for actionable insights in the realm of problem solving and innovation: if I want to think differently, I need to seek different inputs!
Seeking out and capturing inspiration is a critical discipline to cultivate.
World-class designer and biochemist Whitney Burks recently shared her approach to mood boarding: “One of the things that I've been trying to work on within the last year and a half or so is what I call a goosebumps journal. Essentially, it's like, I read something in a book, and it gives me goosebumps. Then, I underline it right there, I transfer to this journal, and then I have this collection of words, or phrases, or even just context in the story that really meant something to me and invoked this feeling that I can go back to and look at.
I've been trying to do that for other things as well. I see something on the Internet that I like how it's designed, or I like one specific aspect of it, and I really zoned in on what that aspect is that I liked, and then try to convey that in projects that I do in the future. I may not like the whole chair, but I love the way they connected the legs to the body, or something like that. I focus on that point.”
It doesn’t matter what you call it. If the designer speak of ‘mood board’ or ‘goosebumps journal’ freaks you out, create your own name. Designers have just given a new name to a very old idea. Isaac Newton had his famous “waste book.” During the enlightenment, thinkers like John Locke and John Milton kept “commonplace books.” More recently, acclaimed Director David Lynch describes “gathering firewood.” Anne Lamott folds index cards into her back pocket. Steven Johnson keeps a spark file. Seinfeld uses a yellow legal pad.
No matter the era, great thinkers have been deliberate about seeking out and capturing inspiration.
No matter your mood, you should keep a mood board.
Related: Input—>Output & Think Outside The Box
Related: The Inspiration Discipline
Related: Capture Inspiration
Related: Gather Firewood
Related: Embrace the Muse
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One of the defining contributions the d.school is helping teams ask themselves, “What kind of thinking is appropriate, when?” We call such clarity being “Mindful of Process.” And it can seem like semantics until you realize we need to show up in different ways.