Cheng Peng

Big questions interrupt the daily routines people fall into and prompt them to step back and see their life from a distance. Here are some of my favorite questions that do that: “What crossroads are you at?” At any moment, most of us are in the middle of some transition. The question helps people focus on theirs. “What would you do if you weren’t a

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We think in questions. If knowledge is a complex web inside the mind, each node is a question, and each connecting line the information you’ve picked up on the journey from node to node. The pursuit of knowledge is the accumulation of questions. They shape our identity as much by being asked as by being answered.

Ideas can feel complete. It's only when you try to put them into words that you discover they're not. So if you never subject your ideas to that test, you'll not only never have fully formed ideas, but also never realize it.

—Paul Graham

the easiest thing to do in a product is add a feature. People new to design tend to see the world of product as a set of features to build more than an experience to balance, and they rush to add things until they paint themselves in a corner with an encumbered experience that lacks a cohesive purpose. Balancing and integrating takes a lot more eff... See more

Many ideas are provisional: they have yet to be fully grasped, made explicit, connected to what they should be connected to, had all their components implemented, carved at the joints, made available for use, indexed. Many important ideas are provisional. Playing with provisional ideas helps nurture them.

people new to design tend to confuse an idea for the expression of an idea. Ideas are easy, because they don't rely on specifics. Expressing ideas is incredibly difficult, because doing it well requires a deep understanding of the medium that is only possible by having worked in it, such as understanding which methods to use where, identifying subt... See more

Material artifacts have an ability to enroll and align different tribes in a way that text doesn’t. The goal is to make “boundary objects” - artifacts that self-translate for all kinds of different tribes, and allow these actors to communicate with one another, even when they’re speaking different languages.

Think of the magical role of self-evident... See more

But busyness has a way of stealing creativity from you. Generative work, like art and writing, requires long periods of nothingness: it’s only in that wide empty space that ideas emerge. Long runs, hot showers, commutes that don’t involve harried Slack messages and listening to podcasts at 2x speed. Sitting at the edge of a dock, listening to the o... See more