I recently posed a question to one of my design email lists: How does one learn design?
The answers I got back were less than satisfying. Most people responded with reading suggestions. I think they were answering a different question: How does one teach design?
Anyway, when I think about how I learned design, I canāt help but remember how hard it was for me. I think the difficulty had something to do with being stuck in the mindset of my profession at the timeāI was a programmer at Intel.
While thinking of this, I kept coming back to the notion that perhaps this all comes back to language? Iām personally unsure if thereās any difference between oneās āway of thinkingā and the language they use to describe their thoughts.
Certainly one of biggest hurdles, for me, was learning how to express the relationships and interactions between people and software. In fact, I recall having a discussion about the problem with a brilliantly eloquent friend of mine, Jon Littell. I was discouraged because I had all these things I wanted to say but I didnāt have the words to describe them. It was endlessly frustrating!
It seems that by writing this, Iām now clearer about the separation between my thoughts and my language because until I had thoughts about design, I didnāt have a need to describe or discuss them with anyone.
I wish I had a better answer than āchange the way you think,ā but it seems thatās how I learned design. Unfortunately, this doesnāt really help us make design more accessible to the great managers and business leaders of the world.
I really do believe that the way great designers filter life, creating their own experiences, is fundamentally different than the way great managers, for example, filter life.
I suppose if I knew the similarities between designersā and managersā filters, then I would have solved the one of the biggest problems for the design community: getting ābusinessā to recognize the value of design.
Please tell me, how did you learn design?