Design Thought Leader

1) People don’t accurately self-report what they do. This is useful when studying customers during research, and managing clients during the whole darn life of a project.

2) Design isn’t an analytical process. Creativity requires taking leaps and risks, success requires managing those risks perfectly.

3) Have a mantra. Have a few words you can say to yourself over and over that captures what yu want to accomplish in a design. Then make it a point to stop every few days and ask yourself, ‘does the design live up to the mantra?’

4) Always look at least one layer out from the design problem. When you’re drawing your designs, always put them in context. What room is the person in? What else is there? It might just force you to be a better sketcher, but it will often give you insight into issues and opportunities you’d otherwise miss.

5) Fidelity matters: Don’t try to be too polished or too rough, be where you are in the process. If you don’t have a good sense of what’s right, find a mentor who can review your work from that perspective. Otherwise, no matter how great your idea is, it’ll get lost in the silly stuff.

Gretchen Anderson
Director of User Interface Design, LUNAR

People tend to think of creativity as a mysterious solo act, and they typically reduce products to a single idea: This is a movie about toys, or dinosaurs, or love, they’ll say. However, in filmmaking and many other kinds of complex product development, creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working effectively together to solve a great many problems. The initial idea for the movie—what people in the movie business call ‘the high concept’—is merely one step in a long, arduous process that takes four to five years.

A movie contains literally tens of thousands of ideas. They’re in the form of every sentence; in the performance of each line; in the design of characters, sets, and backgrounds; in the locations of the camera; in the colors, the lighting, the pacing. The director and the other creative leaders of a production do not come up with all the ideas on their own; rather, every single member of the 200- to 250-person production group makes suggestions. Creativity must be present at every level of every artistic and technical part of the organization. The leaders sort through a mass of ideas to find the ones that fit into a coherent whole—that support the story—which is a very difficult task. It’s like an archaeological dig where you don’t know what you’re looking for or whether you will even find anything. The process is downright scary.

Then again, if we aren’t always at least a little scared, we’re not doing our job.

Edwin Catmull
President, Pixar Animation Studios

Glassblowing is an ancient craft developed by the Romans 2000 years ago. Traditionally, it has always been done in teams of three to six people. Most of the glass I make is created similarly to how it was done then, except that my teams are sometimes as large as twelve to fourteen people simply because the scale is larger and the pieces are more complex.

People ask, ‘How does the team work?’ and ‘How are you able to direct the team?’ It’s not easy to explain. I sometimes make the analogy of myself as a filmmaker. First of all, I come up with a concept, which might be like a script. I don’t work on the team itself but make drawings while the team is working. The whole process is a very exciting and inspiring one, and it is the time when I do all my drawings.

People ask me if I get too removed from the process because of its complexity and the numbers of people involved. But when they numbers involved in making film increase, it doesn’t necessarily put the director further away from the concept of the film. Having the support and skills of a large team can be tremendously gratifying. I feel very fortunate to be able to have such talent at my disposal, especially now that I am getting more involved with large architectural projects and installations. I suppose it would be possible to do these things on one’s own, but the whole process would just be too slow for me. Glassblowing is a very spontaneous, fast medium, and you have to respond very quickly. I like working fast, and the team allows me to do that.

Dale Chihuly
Glass sculptor

The first stage of every new cover is nerves and self-doubt: can I do something interesting, visually smart and get across the fundamental nature of the book and help it sell? Nightmare. So I get reading and then try to throw away all my concerns and fears and start getting stuff down on the page, sketching on paper and working things out on the computer. Usually that means trying out a lot of rubbish and having to trust that eventually something will emerge from the process that works. When that happens I can breathe a short sigh of relief and then get on with developing and refining until the cover is finished.

Coralie Bickford-Smith
Book Designer, Penguin Press

Getting projects built requires strong alliances between the client, engineers, and architect, as well as good collaboration with the city government. Architecture is not a solitary pursuit. I don’t think we’re especially fast or successful at getting things built, at least not by European standards. But we do manage to find clients who share our view of architecture. We have a longing to experiment with space, bring out the site’s potential, and speculate on possibilities for rethinking conventions. It seems risky at first; however, all our projects so far have proved very economically successful. …

One strategy we discuss during the design process is the ambiguity of meaning. A project has more presence and impact if there’s some doubt about it, something quite bold yet difficult to describe and hard to grasp. We like to offer more than one potential reading per project, to allow for individual appropriation, but the relationship between nature and technology is always an underlying topic.

Jürgen Mayer H.
Founder, J. Mayer H. Architects

What we’re expounding is very simple: To be in a space where people can feel the breeze, the sunlight, the changing of the seasons, where they can forge and nourish relationships with one another. That shouldn’t be so complicated, should it?

Takaharu and Yui Tezuka
Founders, Tezuka Architects

Never underestimate the resourcefulness of your users.

If users see something lacking in a design, they’ll find ways to make it work for them. Which is great! The work is done for you. No need to design anymore! Right? Unless, of course, you care about your users’ happiness. And you should.

Users don’t like to work. They like to use. They want whatever it is that they’re attempting to do to just happen. It’s your job to make it happen, and they’re going to let you know if it doesn’t. Which, let’s admit it, is a time-consuming pain for you, and also a sign of two things:

Your users care enough about your product or service to whine when it isn’t working and innovate around it. But also…

You’re not doing it right.

You’re just plain not doing your job if your users aren’t happy.

Heather Rasley
The Deputy, Automattic, Makers of WordPress

The challenge of communicating the significance of numbers—and acting on them—is to find ways to bring them closer to people’s day-to-day experience.

Building intuition about numbers is different from shocking people with numbers.

A good statistic is one that aids a decision or shapes an opinion. For a stat to do either of those, it must be dragged within the everyday. That’s your job—to do the dragging. In our world of billions and trillions, that can be a lot of manual labor. But it’s worth it: A number people can grasp is a number that can make a difference.

Dan and Chip Heath
Authors, Made to Stick