6 Reasons to start creating
your own Experimental Projects

These are my ideas on how experimental design projects can lead to your professional growth and how to overcome some downsides of working solo.

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You’ve seen a product and wished you could have a chance to work their brand identity from scratch. You want to rethink an entire website so that it offers a better user experience. You like to create some interior designs but you’re unemployed and you don’t have enough assets to pull a collection together. There are plenty of reasons to explain why you could start working on experimental projects. It gives you the opportunity of either tackling those topics or bring your own ideas to life.

“But an experimental project doesn’t lead you anywhere if it’s not about something concrete” — this is a valid statement, I just don’t agree with it at all. So, why do I think working on experimental design projects is good? Below are some of my reasons.

1. Different contexts, different solutions

Sometimes we get our mind stuck on our 9 to 5 jobs, thinking about the same products and solutions all day, everyday. Although is it always a work in progress, we don’t always have the opportunity of thinking outside the box or stimulate our creativity and strategic thoughts as we wished.

Working on different problems requires different solutions. So if you start working on a few experimental projects you will have to think about different patterns, maybe create brand new approaches, and you will have a lot of chances to think and rethink your solutions. You’ll get more creative and you’ll probably learn things that may also be useful on other projects. On the other hand, you have an endless list of possibilities to work on, as you’re free to choose your products, plans, targets and goals. But you need to distanciate yourself from what you want and need, as you’re not theoretically creating something for youself.

That leads me to point out one downside: you’re working alone, so you don’t have direct inputs from others. But you can always contact people who inspire you for some ideas or even feedback. If you don’t know that many people who could help then this could be a great opportunity for some networking :)

2. You can work under flexible deadlines

One great thing about doing your own experimental projects is that you don’t have to finish all the things…for yesterday :) but this can also be problematic as having no pressure from external sources may lead us to procrastinate. You’ve got to stay commited and work on your project on a regular basis just like any other project but, of course, on a schedule that makes sense for you. My suggestion is that you give yourself some realistic deadlines so that, even though you have a decent amount of time or a lot of flexibility, you also stay focused on giving a bit of yourself everyday. A great way to make a plan work is to create your own roadmap. This way, you will feel much more motivated to reach the different milestones.

3. You can go through every design stage

We all know this is overly devalued on a lot of projects. Sometimes the lack of time, budget or even design maturity don’t let us go through every phase as we should. We don’t research properly and we don’t ideate properly (and for sure we sometimes don’t even test things properly). Also, on teams who lack that design maturity (whichever the design field) we tend to step into the design part very quickly because there’s not a clear understanding of the process that needs to be followed before starting — design may have a few subjective nuances to it but our creation freedom is limited by the objective boundaries brought up by our process and information we have.

4. Building up a portfolio gets easier

One thing we sometimes struggle with is the lack of enough material to include in our online portfolios. Maybe it is because we don’t like the type of work we are doing at the moment or we don’t think it has enough quality; maybe it is because we are legaly unable to showcase our work online. With experimental projects we don’t have legal problems and the best thing is that it definitely shows a slice of who we are, what we like, and how we usually work.

5. Helps you get proficient on design tools

Just like a developer sometimes works on personal side projects to get better at a coding language, you can get proficient on your design tools! There’s a lot to explore and the more you design, the more you will master them.

6. It is fun!

Pretty self-explanatory :) if you love it, you will have fun doing it.

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Don’t forget the purpose of creating these experimental design projects. They shouldn’t be treated as real projects as they will for sure have some flaws in the way. Remember this quote from Brenda Laurel:

"A Design isn't finished until somebody is using it."

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Recommended readings:

“Embracing an experimental mindset: Creating A Customer-Obsessed Design Culture (Part 4)”, by Alex Cuthbert.

“Experimental product design — prototyping with live data”, by Miklos Philips.