D1: Curiosity

If there is one reason to write this blog diligently (almost) everyday, it is CURIOSITY.

Curiosity as a topic is very close to my heart. It is one of the main reasons why I picked up a creative career. The secret agenda is I want to stay curious all along. If i had a second name, it would be "WHY". My brain explodes everyday with a number of whys. I hit the bed everyday with a number of unanswered questions and yet I wake up with so much enthusiasm to find more.

So the first question I asked myself as a designer was, what keeps us (human beings) curious?

This curious question made me run around for several years. I guess I finally found the answer and the answer just blew my mind.

Are you curious to know?

Broadly there are only two types of things that keep us curious.

1. Surprises and extreme outliers.
2. Many answers to the same question aka confounded evidence.

Let me explain.

The minute we see the image below, we know what stands out. May be this is why we are excited about outliers and we are curious to know more. Are you drawn to people who are outliers? It may be your curiosity pulling you.

When what we expect and what is reality are different, we get curious. Checkout the little video below from Beau Lotto's TED talk. I bet you would go further and dig deeper. Your curiosity will make you do that.

On the other hand, when you see that there are many possibilities, you get excited.

If you look deeply you can see both the old and young woman. A women's day special may be 😜

When there are multiple possibilities you get super excited like this one and engage deeper and longer with the content.

There are more nuances to curiosity obviously but broadly speaking surprises and confounded evidence keeps us curious. As designers we use, overuse, misuse and abuse these aspects for more engagement. Starting from click bait(y) titles to cliff hanger interactive stories, our job is to play with your curiosity.

We will dig some nuggets of curiosity this week.

🥂 to curiosity!

If you are new here this note is for you:

This week we shall explore "curiosity" as a topic in our weekly series and let us slice and dice five ideas around curiosity (monday through friday). Saturday let us summarise the week along with a few resources that can help you go further in the path.

P.S: I have been dabbling with weekly series for the past 4 weeks (Career, Values, Creativity) and I guess it is finally coming to a decent shape, I think. If you have better ideas please hit reply and let me know. I read every single email. Promise.