What Makes Designers So Great

I know what you’re going to say, a design company talking about why designers are so great, this surely can’t be biased! Well buckle up and let’s find out if they really are.To start this off I feel we need to go back to what makes someone a designer, we can state the obvious in that someone needs to be creative, innovative, practical, and an outside the box thinker. But in all honesty, there are so many industries that this can be applied too, and more and more modern companies are looking for these qualities to excel their companies. So, what is it specifically within these qualities that’s makes a designer so great? Honestly it comes down to their ability to fail and the ability to learn from their findings. Edison went through 900 lightbulb iterations before a finalised design and likewise Dyson produced over 5000 prototypes before he was satisfied with his cyclone technology, the commonality between them being they both kept failing.

A designer is hardwired to learn from their mistakes and not be put down for them, in fact its good to fail, if you’re not failing you haven’t fully explored an idea, unless you’re a design wizard but they’re a whole different topic! I find it so difficult to watch my friends panicking about a presentation or report they must submit, knowing full well that if something is wrong, they will be punished or called out for it. I compare that to giving a presentation myself and I relish the opportunity for someone to point out there might be a better way of doing something or explaining why they don’t think something will work. It’s a learning and building excess which instils a greater depth of learning in an individual. Now I’m not saying I can rock up to every meeting a have failures and issues, but if I have learnt from previous problems and implemented them then new issues are perfectly ok, projects can move along faster with this positive reinforcement and designers become better designers being encouraged to fail fast and learn faster rather than staying in the safe zone and not growing.

This style of learning makes designers highly adaptable individuals capable of tackling problems they may have very little experience in all because they understand and appreciate an effective way of learning. Now you may still be thinking this is still very heavily biased towards designer, and you know what you would right. But I’m a designer myself and like I said we fail fast and learn faster so maybe my next blog might be slightly less biased!