Good designers are willing to question

Flexibility in changing conditions is great, but it’s hard to get there if we can’t achieve that flexibility within ourselves. Designers need the willingness to ask questions and avoid resting on assumptions or past experiences in deciding what is true and correct in this case, at this moment. Being willing to question means being willing to challenge your ideas. It means admitting that your solution could be flawed. Moving past our ego’s attachment to our work is critical. Questioning your ideas also invites others into dialogue. If you show you are willing to subject your ideas to open, honest inquiry, people will engage in the inquiry process with you. They’ll help you challenge your ideas, and they’ll help you make your ideas better. And hopefully, they’ll invite you to challenge their ideas too.

We also have to be willing to question ourselves in other ways. To question our best practices, our proven methodologies, and our universals that apply to every design problem. Staying open-minded and questioning how we work enables us to continue growing.

We also have to be willing to question not just ourselves but the people and the systems that shape how we do our work to ensure that we can be successful in being human-centered. This is about looking at the environments we work in because design work is always situated in the context of the human organizational and technology systems that deliver the experiences we envision. So we must be realistic about the readiness of those systems to deliver an experience in a genuinely human-centered way. If those systems can evolve, we must support and guide that evolution; if they can’t, we either learn to work within those constraints or find new ones to move on to. But we can’t understand our constraints if we aren’t willing to question them.

Good designers have a capacity for discomfort.

All of this questioning – of ourselves, questioning of our collaborators and our partners, can be an uncomfortable process.

In reality, there’s a lot about design that’s uncomfortable – if you’re doing it right.

Because exploring new ideas means, by definition, you’re going places where you have not been before, doing things you have not done until now. It can be – should be – a scary feeling. And sometimes you feel like you are lost in the woods, wondering if you will ever find your way out. You have to be okay with that – you have to be comfortable with that uncertainty. As much as we might always want more context, information, data, and insight, we also have to be comfortable with not having all the answers. As much as the design process involves making judgments, it is often about suspending judgment. And suspending judgment can be challenging because we feel pressure to push toward a conclusion.

Another kind of discomfort comes up when we design for people who are very different from us. Uncertainty is introduced when we have to bridge the gap between our own experience and the experience of other people. It can be uncomfortable because it requires us to really acknowledge how different we can be.

Good designers tolerate failure.

One of the most uncomfortable things we can face is when our work misses the mark. We drew the wrong conclusion; we gathered the wrong data; we prioritized the wrong things — we got it wrong. And inside, some of us might believe that this makes us wrong as people, as designers. You may believe that this makes you “not good enough”.

This is yet again the ego getting in the way of sound judgment. We must rise above that voice of shame and own faulty assumptions, bad judgments, and unsatisfactory outcomes. This way can better understand why they were faulty, bad, or unsatisfactory. If we don’t get caught up in the ego, we can learn faster and make different choices next time.

Live in your body

Good designers bring a real sense of embodiment to their work. We tend to think of technology design as intellectual work, but being present in your body is an important part of the creative process.

An entire scientific field is dedicated to this – “embodied cognition” – which studies how our physical engagement with the world influences our thinking and creativity. As you think through problems, get up from your desk, move around, physically manipulate objects – or just go for a walk. By changing how our bodies relate to our environments from moment to moment, we access cognitive resources and problem-solving capabilities that we can’t get any other way.

This affects the creative process in a couple of different ways. Designers tend to be visual thinkers, so we create visual artifacts – slide shows, presentation decks, wireframes, and mockups. This allows us to play with ideas, give them shape and color and manipulate and transform them in our mind’s eye. By moving beyond the simple visual – by creating and working with physical artifacts – we can engage the visual systems and the motor-sensory system as well – feeling our way through the problem even if we are still working at the level of abstract ideas.

A second way embodiment manifests in the creative process is by changing our stimuli. Stand instead of sitting. Go for a walk – get out instead of spending all your time in the office. When we change our stimuli, we change our thinking, which changes our access to the “adjacent possible.”

Good designers are self-aware.

To be present in our bodies, we must be present with ourselves, aware of what’s happening to us from moment to moment. Physical self-awareness can range from simply knowing when it’s time to turn up the room’s heat to when it’s time to go to the bathroom. If we’re present with our physical bodies, we can become more aware of what we physically need to do our best work.

Some of us know that our peak creative time is first thing in the morning after a croissant and coffee. And for some of us, it’s in the middle of the afternoon, when the sun is out, and we’ve been able to do some work and get some momentum going. And others function best in the middle of the night while the world sleeps.

If you know what works for you and your body, you can create patterns in your life optimized for your optimal personal creativity. If we aren’t paying attention to the body, then we also aren’t paying attention to the cues that the body gives us in the creative process when ideas resonate.

Good designers have good instincts.

The development of creative instinct – means tuning into intuition. The responses from the unconscious mind are transmitted to us through bodily sensations. The unconscious mind works more quickly than the conscious mind. It can process input and respond to information in a fraction of the time it takes the conscious mind to respond.

We receive intuitive messages from the unconscious mind as sensations in our bodies: butterflies in our stomach, our heart skipping a beat, a shiver down our spine. There are many subtle ways in which our unconscious mind gives us clues as to something – reactions to what is being processed. There is a sense of energy when you start moving toward a suitable solution in the creative process. We can feel it in our bodies if we can stay connected to it.

So if we can bring a sense of connection and intuition into the design critique process, we can notice how we respond. Do you start to get fidgety in your chair while discussing an idea? Are people leaning in? Am I feeling physically withdrawn? All of these things tell us what resonates with an idea for us.

Inevitably, when we get to the end of that process, we can always backtrack and fill in with a rational explanation for why the design works, but if we listen to those things that our bodies are telling us to feel like the right ideas, we can make more of those intuitive leaps, and broaden (again) our access to the adjacent possible.