One of my favorite hobbies is boardgaming. And actually since I don’t get to play boardgames too much, its actually shopping for boardgames. Its easy to forget that imagining yourself in a situation playing with this or that boardgame is not actually playing the boardgame in real life. This is a minor issue for a hobby, if I’m getting entertainment one way or the other its really not big deal.
But in design that is a problem. Not so much in the professional world, but it was the one piece of valuable education I got from my time in graduate school. For all the benefits of the rigorous program in Berkeley, there was a tendency to allow students to wallow in conceptual design. My first couple professors at Rice, David Guthrie and Doug Oliver, taught me to get past that phase. Shopping for the right idea to jumpstart your design is a necessary task, but after that comes the hard part of design. Its easy to be stuck in the world of ideas, but there is so much more to be done if you just drill down a little more.