DesignTalk: Conversations with Design Innovators
What is design? Since I began my career as a graphic designer, I’ve been fascinated by the ever-increasing number of answers to that question. When I started, my role seemed fairly clear cut. I worked on print and later digital communications, mostly focusing on aesthetics—typography, composition, color, photography, and illustration.
Since that time, the designer’s role has grown to encompass outcomes beyond the static products we see or touch. Design now visualizes information in real-time, guides us through decision-making processes, and impacts our everyday experiences in ways we might not even be aware of.
Designers bring skill sets that expand on the traditional visual design education. Designers can include professionals from many backgrounds, including cognitive psychologists, code-experimenting experiential artists, business and marketing gurus, and expert group facilitators.
I started the DesignTalk interview series as an opportunity to explore the ever-expanding nature of design. What are the processes? Outcomes? Expectations? What is design’s role today, and how is it changing the way we see the profession?
Because each participant is unique, it’s exciting for me to dive into their specific work and ask the questions I’d love to know more about (and I’m always thrilled at how generous participants are with their time and expertise). However, some throughlines have surfaced over time that underscore similarities in process and mindset across the interviews.
The following three questions are themes that crop up repeatedly. I’ve collected responses here that show consistency in thought and approach.
How do you define design?
This question gets to the heart of why I started this series to begin with. The answers have been fairly consistent. Almost all of the responses frame design as a process, as opposed to an output. The process described is one of open-minded questioning and an effort to deeply understand the audience. Here are a few of my favorite responses.
“I think of (design) more as a verb...Design is like the scientific method for business—a rigorous approach to surfacing, investigating, and answering questions.”
“The only part of the person you ever really design for is the brain, so you need to understand the context and motivations first.”
“...design is our method...for observing, understanding, and making connections through radical empathy.”
To me, these answers get to something core about the creative process. For many designers, there can be a rush to get to the outcome you are tasked to create. There are usually outer forces, preconceived ideas, and deadlines that drive the need to build the expected final product. Where insightful, effective design can happen is in the initial stages, before anything has been built. You can take the time to understand your audience and ask the questions that will lead to creating something relevant and effective, even if it means steering away from what the team and stakeholders think the project “should” be.
What mindset shift do you enable with clients to get the best results? What’s the most challenging aspect of this?
This question stems from a hurdle I think many professionals face, but especially those in the design field. The “What do you do?” question. If you are building an end product, it’s easy to say “I make websites”, or something similar. But to get to the heart of how you bring value through your work, you need to have a way to explain why what you do would be valuable to a client. To create effective work, you are usually describing an outcome vs. a product, and you are probably taking some non-intuitive paths to get to that outcome.
Responses to this question had themes of “simplicity” and the value of getting to the “why” of a project.
“...it’s that less is more. As in, you will reach a wider audience if you focus on fewer people. As in, you will be better at what you do if you try to do fewer things. As in, your prospects will do exactly what you hope they’ll do if you give them fewer options.”
“This isn’t stuff that a solo operator does in the dark corner of a library—it is human and social in nature; the challenges are related to working with people in an effective and impactful way.”
“...it can be hard for people to know what they actually want. I find that if you ask why around five times, you’ll actually understand what it is they want.”
I think the mindset challenge here is on both sides—client and designer. For me, the default setting for a long time had been—“I make this particular output (website, book design, etc.). If that’s what you think you need, let’s build it!” It’s taken some time to realize the better way for designers and clients to approach a potential project is to ask “what are we trying to accomplish, and why?”
How do you cultivate curiosity?
At the core of any effective design approach is the good-natured tendency towards curiosity. The best work can come from the impulse to dig deeper and understand more. To be brave enough to shake yourself out of patterns and assumptions, even if that means taking some steps back to move forward.
Many of the interview participants talk about experimentation, and doing additional work and discovery ahead of a project, for the sake of exploration and learning.
“I also love to learn new things and do things I don’t know how to do. I just never get complacent about any of it. I’ve never really understood the idea of the expert. How can you be an expert when you’re on a constant drive to learn and improve?”
“As for visual experimentation, that’s kind of my mode of operation! For every thing I pitch to a client, post on social media, or otherwise present publicly, I have 50+ sketch concepts behind it.”
“Most projects involve some kind of experimentation in the beginning...We also really like to make visualizations of our clients’ data before they even hire us, as part of the business development process and to verify that we understand what the task is or is going to be.”
I find that cultivating curiosity has a lot to do with granting yourself permission to do so. A lot of times, straying from what’s understood as the “task at hand” can seem like an indulgent activity. Following what you are interested in and seeing what you learn from it, without the constraints of schedules and requirements, can allow you to experiment, learn, and bring fresh ideas to projects. Through these interviews, I got the sense that curiosity and experimentation were key to the successful work of the interview participants.
DesignTalk has been one of the most rewarding self-generated projects I’ve worked on. I’m always so excited to find design experts that are willing to share their insights and grateful for their generosity and time. I’m looking forward to conducting more interviews and to continue indulging my own curiosity about the amazing work out there that is bending the traditional definition of design.