How Rejected Design Ideas Can Revive Future Concepts

Woman scratching her head in frustration

As the old adage goes: “waste not, want not” – Mottainai (Japanese: もったいない,) is a Japanese term conveying a sense of regret concerning waste. Here at Isshoku, we understand that the design process is tedious, strenuous, and time-consuming. Piles of endless concepts and pitches – fragments of artwork flung into the bin. Would all those potential ideas be all for naught? All that time, all that effort – gone with the wind? What happens to the rejected design ideas that never get brought up again? What can you do with previous shards of creative eureka that lived in your sketchbook for that one fleeting moment? Here’s a few ways to bring back previous ideas to life, or gain inspiration from them.

Lay them to rest

Recently Rejected website
Rest in art piece peace.

An option is to give your design a good eulogy before submitting it in Recently Rejected, the design cemetery. Here, you’ll find a plethora of incomplete, unpolished and – you guessed it – rejected artwork from various graphic design companies like Twice Studio, MVM, Craig & Karl, Ordinary People and Non-Format.

Having a “curated graveyard” that gives a nod towards the time and effort of designers that would have been otherwise unseen. By unearthing and celebrating these showcases in the form of terminated artwork, it sheds light on the design process of someone else. From how an ordinary-looking concept was generated to how it can give someone else ideas on how to formulate their next design.

Wake me up inside

The Ressurection of the Darlings by Ines Cox
Ines Cox, The Resurrection of the Darlings, 2016, FAT magazine

Forgetting a previous idea you had is easy. But putting your previous ideas into current design processes and using what you’ve archived to move forward with is what we should all be striving towards.

Old but gold

This is what Antwerp-based designer and educator Ines Cox constantly works towards. She enjoys keeping a “personalised graveyard” with ring binders full of sketches, test prints, scribbled ideas and various notes. “I’m a maniac about documenting my design process,” says Cox. “I feel it’s necessary to make (almost) every step of my process physical, which is why I print as much as possible. Comparing compositions and eliminating ideas is easier when I put things next to one another on a table. When a project is done, I carefully archive all these sketches and prints. I call them my ‘darlings’.”

Burying one’s experiences and never giving it a second glance again makes for little progress as a designer. Besides the works that were never finished or used, we should all be constantly striving to improve by looking at our current work, and the ones that never made it.

Expanding Your Creativity With The Hierarchy of Imagination

Hierarchy of Imagination

Based off Maslow’s famous Hierarchy of Needs, Patti Brennan’s Hierarchy of Imagination is represented as a pyramid progressing from the base of reactionary behavior with little or no imagination (since Reflex is involuntary), then proceeding upward to Problem Solving, then Creativity, and finally the pinnacle of “completely unrestrained” Imagination. It is a very thought-provoking and useful model, and I wanted to share this with you!

The Pyramid of Success?

The Hierarcy of Imagination, as explained by Patti BrennanIn this article, we learn that she had help in developing her model from her colleague and mentor John Maeda who understood imagination as “a gift that can be opened when one has some degree of safety and agency” – the same conditions we need to open the gift of play.

Maeda also mentioned that he “sincerely enjoyed how this model felt in [his] mind”, and that piqued more of my interest in seeing how various designers tick. The execution of a theory being grasped by someone else – based from a clear mental model of why “teaching creativity doesn’t work, but expanding their imaginations might work better”.

With all of this in mind, I strongly believe that designers can try to better cultivate creativity and make full use of it. However, the hierarchy should not be interpreted as disparaging jobs in which little creativity or problem solving is expected. For example, someone who is working in the Reflex category should not be expected to proactively solve problems or provide creative leadership.

As this model and Brennan’s article mentions, you can’t teach creativity per se, but you can expand one’s imagination, and being able to broaden one’s visualisation is vital for creativity. Likewise, good product management and product marketing professionals can translate their empathy towards what customers are going through into well-defined products and clear, relevant, engaging messaging, and content.

With that, I would certainly hope to integrate this into more of my future projects, and allow the hierarchy to help with my thought process – all the way to the conception of the end product.

Being imaginative is a gift that you can open when you have some degree of safety and agency. The rest is up to you.