ZURB is a place of learning - we are always trying to keep it fresh. Most of our learning comes from working with clients, developing our apps or just cooking something up for the playground, but we also learn on Riddle Fridays. We started Riddle Fridays about 3 months ago - the idea was that every Friday somebody would come in with a riddle and everyone else would work together to solve it.
The riddles have ranged from lateral thinking puzzles to logic questions to tough mathematical word problems, but all of them are in one way or another, applicable to design.
How you ask? A good riddle is no different than a design problem.
Lateral thinking puzzles can seem impossible at first, but often times the solutions are shockingly simple. Design is the same way. Sometimes design problems can seem impossible to solve, but given enough focus and thought they can be solved in beautifully simplistic ways.
Logic problems require you to think analytically and break down a problem into its components, the same way you would a design problem before you approach it. Making sure you fully understand the what the root of a problem is how you can start to solve it.
Mathematical word problems are most most often a question framed with a series of constraints or rules. Design is exactly like that, especially with clients. There are set of expectations and constraints a client has, and as the designer you have to work within those to get the best possible answer.
Try A Riddle
A few weeks back Anthony came in with this killer mathematical word problem. Here's the setup:
There are four towns (A, B, C, D) that lie at corners of a ten-mile square. The king wants to connect the towns with road, but the least possible road since it's expensive. The engineers come up with the three designs below, eventually deciding on #3 since it uses only 28.3 miles of road. When they presented to the king, he was outraged and said he could connect the 4 towns with less road. What was the king's layout?
Show The Answer
Riddle Friday is AWESOME. It's a good way to break a mental sweat and get everyone together to work as a team on a single task.