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The ability to experience as a learner
Having moments of uncertainty allows you to regain a sense of education about yourself and your environment. You only can have these souvenir moments by allowing yourself to be disconnected. Being disconnected is being vulnerable for these experiences to be found and reveal important things you did not know. Disconnection is turning off your devices—even yourself. By allowing these experiences of getting lost, not understanding a language, using foreign currency and many other what would seem intangible circumstances in your comfort zone, you are allowing yourself the ability of how to learn again in a space that is foreign to your understanding.

The routine designed for yourself can be broken
Our habitual routine defines who we are. Whether it is a certain style of work, thinking or problem solving, we grow accustomed to the routine(s) we have designed for ourselves. Traveling allows you, the designer, to reconfirm whether this style is even worth keeping, and allows for immediate change to your predisposed process. Routine and process are dictated steps towards a common goal, and are able to work hand-in-hand for the majority of cases. Despite this claim, your routine can definitely impact your process for better or worse. In route to an unknown place, a new state of being, routines are broken and temporary moments of rediscovery are implemented.

The opportunity for deep reflection through comparisons
Perspective comparisons are shown through every imaginable circumstance in your new destination. It is the food you eat, the textures on the walls, the sounds in motion, new landscapes, getting lost, meeting new people, finding beauty in graffiti, discovering new music…you get the idea. The fact is that comparative objects of discovery are literally everywhere. It is up to us to understand how new people, places and things apply to our own life through reflection. By equating what is new, we are able to change what is old. This usually comes at the end of your trip, once these experiences have had time to filter. These memories become keepsakes that promote change when you arrive back home and attempt to begin your daily functions.

As long as we are changing as designers, we are growing as designers. The continual pursuit of perpetual busyness can be laid aside. You are now free to move about the cabin.

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We habitually do it spiritually, individually, spontaneously and even holistically with the visuals and messages we come into contact with daily. Validation and the search for meaning are buried within the relationships obtained when we, consumers, encounter brands beyond a surface level.

This is due to the popular demand to establish credibility through the things we buy. Despite this argument, what we fail to remember is that we are having an experience, physically and often sensorially, everywhere, all the time—when we get into a car, turn on a television, check into a hotel or order fast food. The key differentiator is how well the given experience fulfilled our needs as a consumer and defined our role in juxtaposition with that given brand.

Despite the usual allegations of crafting a brand to sale without any substance, our job as creatives is not rooted in coming up with the most interesting visual or concept. Instead, our job is to ask questions, establish systems for communication and discover what type media should be used to effectively define an array of benefits for our audiences’ goals. If meaning is delivered through experiences; what type of experiences can be created to build strong, definable messages that increase brand value?

If Starbucks was just another cup of coffee, would it stretch across cultures globally? If Apple was just another technology company, would your iPhone just be another cellphone? Through building upon a defined, experiential space, offering differentiation and increasing loyalty through consistency, the benefits become personified and connect with an audience on a meaningful level.

Making meaning can be initially generated through asking questions and understanding why a specific audience requires certain benefits from a product, service or entity. After all, a brand’s benefits become the experience. The experience then becomes the meaning.

We live in a culture of nonstop messaging with an overabundance of interactivity and habitual activity. Lets let go of the repetitive nature of designing brand experiences that offer the usual suspects: speed, availability and low price. Instead, lets give consumers what they really desire—meaning.

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One thing we fail to remember about our process is the environments we surround ourselves within and work from. Our physical surroundings help bring about new layers of creativity. Leaving one environment and finding refuge in another may, at first, be seen as escaping our comfort level, however it will help reshape our process by seeing, evaluating and understanding things we have not before. There is power behind ecological comprehension, by allowing your surroundings to help influence your creative process. Elements in these new environments spark inspiration and creativity. If variety is the catalyst to launching new perspectives, why are we so complacent on staying in one place all the time, one process?

By lowering our inhibitions and accepting our surroundings with an open mind will help to initiate this process. In traveling overseas recently, it was great to see and hear new languages, but to also see how others conducted their own outlooks into their daily walk. By being placed in an environment that prompted quick direction deciphering to and from locations, seeing new typefaces, new colors and new weather—it was great to be alienated in that experience. My willingness to adapt increased while my inhibitions decreased.

Breaking out of the ordinary will also allow our environment to play a role in our process. This reigns true to being able to work better at home, in coffee shops, in a park, with others or alone. Define your comfort level and be challenged ecologically by evaluating your location in comparison to your former process and outcomes.

We will experience a shift in routine by not allowing time to dictate our motives. Usually time is the dictator of our process, it shouldn’t be, but in most cases it can become the gatekeeper to success or failure. Time is just a measurement tool that Man has adopted to attach to motivation on whether certain tasks are complete, or not. Don’t let your next project be just another task. Don’t allow time to manage your motivation, thus your outcomes.

There is comfort in uncertainty.
Being in different surroundings will influence the way we see things and reorder our steps for our next creative endeavor. Your challenge: go somewhere new. Maybe not by plane to a foreign land, but by going to a new part of town or taking a new way home after work. So get lost. Get inspired. See things differently.

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