Welcome to the home of Noah Brier. I'm the co-founder of Variance and general internet tinkerer. Most of my writing these days is happening over at Why is this interesting?, a daily email full of interesting stuff. This site has been around since 2004. Feel free to get in touch. Good places to get started are my Framework of the Day posts or my favorite books and podcasts. Get in touch.

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First Principles Thinking

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 // This post is about: , , ,