These 4 questions are on the back of our business cards and I often turn to them to get myself back in the headspace of prioritising and valuing the customer rather than me or even my client.

That’s how I warm up.

you could also organize your bookshelf by author. then reorganize by topic. then by color. then by width…

These all seem like very strenuous tasks. What about playing 52 card pickup stacking in suit?

I just mention this b/c every example I think of in some way or another can be called a fake project, depending on how you define project. So that is my qualify. But here are the things I do and teach my students to do in each area of design:

Design Research:
Observe and journal: Observe the world around you. Pick a topic of interest so there is some type of focus, and then observe. Use photography, sketching and narrative writing as capture tools of that observed world and finally find reasons to talk about it with others.

Design ideation:
Sketch. Sketch, sketch sketch and sketch some more. Don’t ever go through a week w/o having at least 100 sketches centered around an idea of interest. Keep to one idea (focus) per week. Not necessary to keep the same focus as design research, but why the hell not?

HCI:
Do a heuristic on something a week in your house. (do same thing as a cognitive walk through).

UI Design:
1. Deconstruct UIs to some principles or foundations that you are acquainted with
2. Do Wireframes of stuff at the micro-level and then do WFs at the framework level (separately)

But I do think that like many artisan crafts it is in the repeated doing of the whole that is more useful and practical than the repetition of the micro-steps in the process. Our work is more difficult to separate than even a builder or sculptor or even a watch maker. But even the watch maker does not classically practice just making gears. how it works is that the student ONLY makes gears as their sole job for years before being allowed to make a spring coil, or hands, or paint a face, before finally being able to build a watch. Because we do not teach our skills as singular it is hard to then break them down in any way. There is no batting cage or game of catch. Now, its not that we can’t do that …

… Here’s an example I just used in my workshop at Frontiers of Interaction. I had students look at something simple as a chair and then redesign it if they thought about a different activity based on changing the length of time the person will sit in the chair and for what purpose/goal. The reaction from the many in the crowd was “This is too basic”. But my thought is, When did you ever do such an exercise? Considering almost none of us went to IxD school who do this job and I know it won’t be a part of a Graphic or ID class, I feel that we need to no just value these types of skill trainings, but also get over our pre-conceptions of our perceived level of experience. There are so few people who I feel are really experienced at the master level of IxD. I would have trouble thinking of more than a handful, myself (and no I’m not included in that list AT ALL).

I’ve practiced pre-writing, and often found that chunks of the 15-minute “bullshit” text could be copy-pasted into the final text with minor revisions – and these were often the best segments. I find the same with pre-sketching: important design problems are often solved there.

That having been said, there are certainly rituals that people perform to encourage creative thought, banish extraneous mental noise, and so on. From the comments above, it would seem that “different strokes for different folks” applies. For me, I find that sitting on a conference table in front of a whiteboard works best. I have no idea why.

My desk is covered in sheets of paper with little 2×3 thumbnail sketches of wireframes, files are overflowing with document outlines with arrows and x’s to move things around in the doc, and my wall is papered with sticky notes.

I guess that means that my “warm up” is really a brain dump into whatever format is most convenient for then assimilating that brain dump into a cohesive report/wireframe/IA/what have you.

Perhaps, as Dana alluded to, the real practice comes in our jobs seeping into our everyday lives: watching my wife get angry at a website and asking why, writing blog posts and having discussions when there’s no client “deliverable” involved, and trying to help my mother understand how her iPhone works…

But it occurs to me that this is all much more like pre-visualizing and rehearsing than actually practicing.

Does interviewing seatmates on planes count as practicing?

# Get up and take a breather for a few minutes outside for a change of scenery and to jog my thoughts.
# Look at books, magazines or websites that may or may not directly relate to what I’m doing.
# Get a fresh cup of hot tea.
# Clear my desk.
# Start writing down words that pertain to what I’m about to engage in.
# Sketch out as many ideas for layout as possible in a short amount of time to get it on paper. I can refine later.
# Talk to people and do a little rogue customer dev with them.

Getting lots of sleep has always been very beneficial to how productive my creative time is. But that’s not always feasible!