Wednesday 29 September 2010

Relentless curiosity

Designer’s have a unique mindset was required to sift, sort, assign value and create insights from large amounts of information. Useful skills in this day and age!

Doblin Group consultant Jeff Tull described the explorative design mindset, “even when you’re gathering data you’re inherently analysing it, it’s never discrete, but the challenge is to identify, pick signals, find meaningful patterns” … “most design decisions are done using very subjective, qualitative, intuitive sort of decision-making models. So quite literally you look at one or two things, size them up with either a sensory or aesthetic sensitivity that is very difficult to articulate, and say that’s one better.”

John Seely Brown believed that the design mindset required “an ability to understand how sense making actually happens. How do you come to read something? What are the cues that you actually use? How do you actually shape those cues so that they’re slightly different? For example, a good landscape architect can shape the landscape of the land and it just affords you without even knowing to find your way towards the front door. But you take away that landscaping and you may not be able to find the front door. What’s going on in the landscaping that subconsciously pulls you to the right place?”

I came to describe this behavior during my research as relentless curiosity — an apt description!

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