Good article. I feel very comfortable doing this with code and not so much with physical material, where the constraints are much more imposing and the risk of screwing something up is much higher.
Based on my experiences with programming, I imagine part of being able to think this way is also having experience building things physically. The fact that I can think about connecting pieces of backend infrastructure, or bits of reusable code, or a wiring up a handy library to solve a problem is from experience solving problems with the tools at hand.
Probably the best way to get started with this mindset in any problem domain is to just start making things, getting a feel for the capabilities of tools, the strengths of various materials.
In other words, the attitude adjustment is just one part of being able to solve problems this way - you've got to be very comfortable with your tools and materials, or have little to lose so you can experiment safely.
Two principles I see at play here are fluency (a mapping between a desired action and the physical action of using a tool) and parsimony (building something in the simplest or cleverest way to achieve the goal). You get fluency through practice and the parsimony comes through experience, a kind of wisdom - similar but I different concepts.
With software engineering, I think when you're comfortable with the syntax and capabilities of the language you're working with, you get fluency. And then once you have experience using the standard library and some common external libs, you learn parsimony.
Based on my experiences with programming, I imagine part of being able to think this way is also having experience building things physically. The fact that I can think about connecting pieces of backend infrastructure, or bits of reusable code, or a wiring up a handy library to solve a problem is from experience solving problems with the tools at hand.
Probably the best way to get started with this mindset in any problem domain is to just start making things, getting a feel for the capabilities of tools, the strengths of various materials.
In other words, the attitude adjustment is just one part of being able to solve problems this way - you've got to be very comfortable with your tools and materials, or have little to lose so you can experiment safely.