Putting Disorientation into the Design Process

Jared Spool describes the technique of putting disorientation into the design process - or "hunkering" as one person they studied called it.

Even though each craft was different, the behavior of hunkering was the same:

• They lay out whatever physical pieces they have -- raw materials, sketches, and images they'd collected.
• They work to put things close to where they'd be in their final form, relative to the other pieces.
• Then they step back and ponder it for a while.
• In some cases, they walk around to view it from a different angle, to see what it looked like from another perspective.
• Then they start back up to work.

Hunkering doesn't seem to be the appropriate term here as that implies leaning in and getting to work. The process described above is the opposite motion of stopping work, stepping back and assessing the design.

I used this process frequently as I'm sketching designs and creating wireframes and prototypes. The process is also used within our team by conducting design reviews with the product manager, developer, QA and system architect leads. In a recent project, conducting these reviews allowed us to catch many issues early on that would have been very costly to fix in code.