Marijn van der Poll

About Marijn van der Poll

Marijn van der Poll founded his design studio in 2000. His work is part of the collection of amongst others the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Time magazine considered his Do hit chair a collectable design must-have. He advises governmental organizations such as the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management and is an ambassador of the internationally renowned Dutch Design Week. This past year, he held the position of creative leader at Koningsdag, King’s Day in the Netherlands. Marijn is a permanent faculty member at the Design Academy Eindhoven (the Netherlands). He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Industrial Design from the same institution and a Master of Science from the University of Nebraska Lincoln. He lives in Eindhoven with his wife and two sons.

Consider the following as you read on.

1. Your left brain has received a solid 20 plus years of training, your right brain, 0.
2. Your left brain has clever tools such as math, language, and science. Faced with everyday, open-ended, slightly more complex questions, and we wind up staring at a canvas or clutching small pieces of sticky yellow paper.
3. For all of the business processes that deal with complex problems, we have overlooked the foundational element of it all, ‘the idea’.
4. Generating and developing ideas is not a talent but a common skill, with a finely tuned instrument. You.

Pitch: When pitched against left-brain academic rigor, the right-brain has traditionally been seen as emotional, focused on aesthetics and is largely misunderstood. Now that is in dire need in our increasingly autonomous and complex work environment we are left untrained and ill prepared. Van der Poll presents the right hemisphere’s divergent nature as an attribute to help a thinker park the search for quick answers. Left brain logic and reason have the habit (and associated training) of forcing to seek a single solution. If you let it, he argues, your right brain can push this desire forward breaking the impasse of many complex problems by means of an intermediate thinking step, an idea.

Ideas are the north star of this non-fiction debut. In it he describes not only what ideas are, but how they can be hypothesised, explored and then tested.