First Principles & Analogy in Design | by Nick Post | Medium

TL;DR: First principles and analogy are complementary tools in the design process. First principle thinking improves your ability to analyse the challenge, while analogical thinking improves your ability to synthesise new ideas. This is a clip from an interview with Elon Musk I often find myself coming back to… “I think it is important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.” — Elon Musk “First principles is a physics way of looking at the world. You boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, ‘What are we sure is true?’… and then reason up from there.” — Elon Musk It’s beautiful, right? Once you hear it, it seems so simple and obvious. And the results speak for themselves. By taking the first principle approach to problem solving; Tesla, Solar City and SpaceX are innovating like no other. So why doesn’t everyone use this way of thinking? Like Elon Musk said, it takes a lot more mental effort. And not everyone is familiar with such a scientific way of appro

TL;DR: First principles and analogy are complementary tools in the design process. First principle thinking improves your ability to analyse the challenge, while analogical thinking improves your ability to synthesise new ideas. This is a clip from an interview with Elon Musk I often find myself coming back to… “I think it is important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.” — Elon Musk “First principles is a physics way of looking at the world. You boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, ‘What are we sure is true?’… and then reason up from there.” — Elon Musk