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I 174 Chapter 6 The process of interaction design

6.3.3 How do you generate alternative designs?
A common human tendency is to stick with something that we know works. We
probably recognize that a better solution may exist out there somewhere, but it's
very easy to accept this one because we know it works-it's "good enough." Set-
tling for a solution that is good enough is not, in itself, necessarily "bad," but it may
be undesirable because good alternatives may never be considered, and considering
alternative solutions is a crucial step in the process of design. But where do these
alternative ideas come from?
One answer to this question is that they come from the individual designer's
flair and creativity. While it is certainly true that some people are able to produce
wonderfully inspired designs while others struggle to come up with any ideas at all,
very little in this world is completely new. Normally, innovations arise through
cross-fertilization of ideas from different applications, the evolution of an existing
product through use and observation, or straightforward copying of other, similar
products. For example, if you think of something commonly believed to be an "in-
vention," such as the steam engine, this was in fact inspired by the observation that
the steam from a kettle boiling on the stove lifted the lid. Clearly there was an
amount of creativity and engineering involved in making the jump from a boiling
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kettle to a steam engine, but the kettle provided the inspiration to translate experi-
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ence gained in one context into a set of principles that could be applied in another.
As an example of evolution, consider the word processor. The capabilities of suites
of office software have gradually increased from the time they first appeared. Ini-
tially, a word processor was just an electronic version of a typewriter, but gradually
other capabilities, including the spell-checker, thesaurus, style sheets, graphical ca-
pabilities, etc., were added.