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You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.

April, 2014

First Principles Thinking

The concept of first principles thinking and its application to working with designers.
Lately I've been talking a lot about Elon Musk's idea of first principles thinking (finding the atomic unit of a challenge and building up from there) and I decided to write a bit about it over at Medium. Here's a snippet about how it applies to working with designers:
What’s interesting, though, is I think you can apply it beyond just big problems to almost any challenge a company or product faces. I gave a talk at our recent DesignTalk event about how to work best with designers. I think encouraging designers to be first principles thinkers is key to getting the best work possible. By this I mean the best way to work with a talented designer is to define the core components of the problem and let them solve up from there. Encourage them to throw away existing solutions and instead solve the problem in a way that best suits the unique issues faced in this case. While the end solution might resemble something else that exists, by not applying analogical thinking you at least know that you’ve arrived at it because it is the best, not because it already exists.
April 27, 2014
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Noah Brier | Thanks for reading. | Don't fake the funk on a nasty dunk.