Ten years ago, the professors Brian Lucas and Loran Nordgren encountered a contradiction. On the one hand, we recognize that other people are more likely to make creative breakthroughs when they persevere. On the other hand. when we feel stuck on a problem, most of us fail to sec how successful we’ll be if we just keep trying. We tend to believe that our creativity drops over time — that if our best ideas don’t come to us immediately, they won’t come at all.

Lucas and Nordgren call this misunderstanding the “creative cliff illusion”, which refers to the false belief that our creativity sharply declines after an initial period of effort, leading us to underestimate our ability to generate new and innovative ideas with continued perseverance. In one experiment, they asked participants to spend 10 minutes generating “as many original ideas for things to eat and drink at a Thanksgiving dinner as you can. ” Afterward, participants were asked to guess how many ideas they would come up with during a second 10-minute period. Most expected to generate far fewer ideas the second time around, but in fact they produced just as many during that second period — 66 percent more than they had guessed. And those were rated by other people as more creative than the initial ideas.

Though we tend to think our ability to come up with ideas is easily consumed, we actually get more creative the longer we focus on a problem or task. One major reason for this is known as the “serial-order effect”. Each next creative idea we have is likely to be better than the one that came before.

The serial-order effect isn’t always easy to see. Most of us have adopted the belief that creativity should feel easy, or “fluent”. And so we associate mental difficulty with pointlessness. But working through bad ideas is a necessary step in the creative process. The first solutions that come to mind tend to be either preexisting ideas or popular wisdom. These are the paths of least resistance. Though avoiding them requires some work, it’s the surest way to find original ideas that aren’t immediately manifest.

The serial-order effect applies to tasks that last minutes or days, but creativity also improves across years, decades, and even careers. The life’s work of most successful entrepreneurs proves it.

After a busy day of work and play, the body needs to rest. Sleep is necessary for good health. During this time, the body recovers from the activities of the previous day. The rest that you get while sleeping enables your body to prepare itself for the next day.

There are four levels of sleep, each being a little deeper than the one before. As you sleep, your muscles relax little by little. Your heart beats more slowly, and your brain slows down. After you reach the fourth level, your body moves back and forth from one level of sleep to the other.

Although your mind slows down, from time to time you will dream. Scientists who study sleep say that when dreaming occurs, your eyeballs begin to move more quickly (Although your eyelids are closed). This stage of sleep is called REM, which stands for rapid eye movement.

If you have trouble falling asleep, some people recommend breathing very deeply. Other people believe that drinking warm milk will help make you drowsy.

There is also an old suggestion the counting sheep will put you to sleep!

One of the most curious features of the modern world is the manner in which design has been widely transformed into something meaningless. But I want to argue design should be the crucial block on which the human environment is shaped and constructed for the betterment and delight of all.

Not surprisingly, in the absence of widespread agreement about its significance and value, much confusion surrounds design practice. In some subject areas, authors can assume common ground with readers. Other subject areas can be so difficult that ho such mutual understanding exists.

Design sits uncomfortably between these two extremes. As a word it is common enough, but it is full of disharmony, has innumerable manifestations (表现), and lacks boundaries that give clarity and definition. As a practice, design generates vast quantities of material, much of it ephemeral, only a small proportion of which has sustained quality.

So how can design be understood in a meaningful sense? Design is one of the basic characteristics of what it is to be human, and an essential determinant of the quality of human life. If things are a necessary part of our existence, why are they often done so badly? There is no simple answer. Cost factors are sometimes advanced, but the remove between doing something well or badly can be exceedingly small, and cost factors can in fact be reduced by appropriate design inputs.

This book is based on a belief that design matters profoundly to us all in innumerable ways and represents an area of huge, underutilized potential in life. It sets out to explore some reasons why this is so and to suggest some possibilities of change. The intention is to extend the range of what is understood by the term, and examine the depth of design practice as it affects everyday life in a diversity of cultures.