Your hidden superpowers: part one

you have abilities most people don't - it's time to use them

The kind of people who end up as designers are, shall we say, unusual. Sometimes our passions get in our way: we can care too much, we can be self-involved and we always want to do great work, even when our bosses don’t feel the same way.

One goal of this book is to help you rediscover your special powers, forgotten instincts that lurk beneath your skills and talents. In Why Design Is Hard we focus on three of them. Here’s the first.

Designers are great investigators 

The best designers are naturally curious. They always have questions, and then questions about the answers to those questions. We don’t accept things at face value: we want to understand how things really work, and why they are the way they are. We want user research, market research, web analytics, and any source that might help us answer our questions. We know that data is a flashlight that helps us see the truth, and we want to design for the world as it really is. If we can spend hours reading about the 16th-century French history behind the beloved font Garamond, or studying the details of the design prototypes Jonathan Ives made to create the first iPhone, we have the rare capacity to discover and digest layers of complex information for practical use in solving problems.

Our investigative curiosity is magical in two ways. First, we can use it to find better answers to important questions leaders have. And second, we can aim our investigative powers at things that we find annoying, like dismissive coworkers, dumb bureaucratic processes, frustrating clients, and short-sighted executives. Ted Lasso said, “Be curious, not judgmental,” and to that we’d add, it’s only by being curious, rather than judgmental, that we make discoveries toward reframing our frustrations. Instead of obsessing about not having a seat at the table or why our ideas get ignored, reframe the problem. Make a habit of asking questions, like:

• What are the most important unsolved problems leaders have?

• Which powerful people have problems I can solve, but they don’t know it yet? 

• How can I sell them on a small, safe project to demonstrate my value?

• Who defends the status quo? Who wants change and how can I ally with them?

As Ellen Lupton, famed graphic designer and curator, said, “Design is an art of situations. Designers respond to a need, a problem, a circumstance, that arises in the world. The best work is produced in relation to interesting situations.” Be an investigator of the project you’re on. Be curious about team leaders. What frustrates them? Which deciders get along and which ones don’t? By playing the role of investigator on the totality of your project, not just the narrowest scope of design, the design work itself becomes easier. 

The bad news is that there’s a natural gravity problem around who gets to work on investigative projects, like future planning or long-term strategy. Such projects are scarce and highly sought after. Powerful people typically assign the responsibility to those they trust the most. This is rarely designers, because we usually haven’t been in the organization as long, so we haven’t been granted (or earned) enough trust. The way forward is to rely on curiosity and the list of questions above.

Read Part two here.

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What special talent do you think designers have that often go unnoticed? Let us know in the comments.