www.fastcompany.com: How do the world’s most accomplished designers come up with fresh ideas day in and day out? Some draw inspiration from chefs. Others put rookies on their team. Still others steal their ideas from clients. Here, we asked 30 experts spanning architecture, product design, UX, academia, and medicine, to share their biggest design secrets.
7 comments:
In this article I really appreciated the idea that design is based almost entirely on empathy and process learning. A design is only as much feeling it evokes in the viewer. Something that looks good is, at its’ core, is something that produces a positive feeling in a bystander. By this logic, all design is about trying to empathize with a certain group of people, sometimes just as many people as humanly possible. On this note, I really liked the quote about designing for the “edge”. The idea of designing for the section of humanity experiencing the most different life than you is a way to create things that push the envelope of what you think you can do. It also encourages designers to think beyond what makes them and their circle happy, inevitably creating content that is more diverse and interesting for all. In the process of doing that empathizing, you learn how to make your current project better and also how to make the process for future projects more diverse, efficient, creative, etc. I really liked this article :)!
Garnering design advice from product designers from the context of a theatrical designer is profoundly interesting. I loved finding the overlap between the intentions these designers had in giving this advice and the ways I will use it in my life and design work. There were some pieces of advice that apply to theatrical design in the exact same way they apply to product design. For example “design like a chef cooks,” which is about putting passion and love into a design, is applicable to all types of design. I also love “Find your inner contrarian.” I think questioning the design choices you first make is the best way to make better and more original designs that aren’t cookie cutter templates of previous tries. However, there are some that apply in less direct ways. One of these is “Good design isn’t about designers.” In the article, this refers to designers needing to do what’s right for their users rather than make a beautiful but unusable design. But for me, I think it can be about knowing when the best version of your design isn’t the most flashy or metaphorical, but the one that best serves the show.
I think it was interesting to get input from so many different kinds of designers. I can be hard to realize how almost everything in our lives has some aspect of design within it. As they said in the article “design is a ubiquitous human activity- we’re all designing all the time.” (Terry Irwin). Also one of my big takeaways is that design is not only about skill and being an expert, you can learn and create from the most unlikely of places. In addition, I thought it was important how in many of the tips, the designers talked about some aspect of adding emotion. Some of them talked about the emotion of the artist, but also the importance of the feelings and the influence of those viewing the designed. I was interested that many of them took a slightly more audience-focused approach to their work. So despite their varying exact disciplines, all designs can be connected by some key foundations.
I think the pressure to be a good designer is more pressing right now than ever. There are so many opportunities and chances around us, that it is hard for me to gauge where I need to go. In terms of being a good designer, I know that it is not often really taught, but rather an instinct that is polished. That gives me anxiety, because the question is whether I have what it takes or not. I often have mixed feelings about education as well, because on one hand I don’t want to learn the conventions of design that often put a plug to the design process, but I also understand that it is incredibly important to know these rules in order to break them. Honestly, some of the advice listed in this article made no sense to me, but perhaps one day, down the road, I can learn to understand some of the advice listed out in this article.
I am pretty positive that I do not want to go into design. But I love designing things for fun. This article jumped out at me because I think it is valuable to have the eye of a designer just within life. I really enjoyed this article. I liked that everyone had something different to say but it all tied back to how to build based on the human you are and the humans you work with. From focusing on clients to the idea that everyone is a designer, these ideas bring forward useful advice that anyone in theatre can use. As a stage manager, many of these ideas are appealing to me because of how they shape the process I am a part of. While this article was focused on the design aspect of theatre I will take many of the ideas forward with me in my own life in and out of the theatre.
I think the idea of ‘how to design’ is one of the most difficult things to teach, and a task I do not envy our professors and others in education. Creativity sometimes feels like such an innate skill, you’re either a creative person or you aren’t, and the ability to think creatively and find new and interesting ways to present ideas is such a large part of any design process. But I also liked the tip in there of ‘everyone is a designer, we are all designing all the time’, because I think those ideas can coexist. Everyone is a designer, although not everyone is a naturally talented designer, but it does seem to be a skill that can be practiced and trained. One of my favorite lessons from classwork so far this year has been in my concert lighting class - we talked about how to break down songs and find areas for repeatability across different lighting systems, but the actual lights and colors and effects being repeated are up to you as the designer. It feels like such a comfortable balance - a framework to work within as something that can be taught, and room for creativity in the actual design as something that comes from you but can be practiced.
I constantly struggle with design. I am not a designer, I am a ‘maker of things’ as Kevin says. Whenever I’m in a design class I approach the assignment from ‘how can I use this material?’ and it's difficult to reach much further than that. However, oftentimes it's not a material, it's a concept or just something more complex. I found this article to be helpful because in some way it validated my insecurity about design, that anyone can do it even if they're not at all a designer. I think Sophie made a great point about how most of the tips seemed to be about emotion and learning. From my experience creating art is an emotional process, and design seems to be quite similar. Additionally if you learn while creating you can apply that to both the current work and all future works. I wondered if all the comments were applicable to theatre and how that would intertwine as well.
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