The Problem With Design Is Designers - Christopher Butler

People who practice design have many common traits. Among them…

We are hypervigilant; we see flaws quickly and everywhere. We are hypercritical; we see opportunity for improvement in everything we experience. We are, simultaneously, optimistic and ambitious; we want to fix everything that is broken and we believe that we can. We find beauty in order; we want the world to be a more beautiful, and thus more orderly, place. We are restless and not easily satisfied. These are traits that make designers good at what they do. Notice that they comprise a single thing: worldview. None specify a particular skill or method. They are about how we see and experience the world around us.

Other traits common to people who practice design are internal. They are reactions to the outside world based upon how we see ourselves.

We are overly sensitive. We see our work as an extension of who we are, making it impossible to disentangle ideas of self-worth from the reception of what we do. We are hypocritical. We are as resistant to critique as we are prone to deliver it. We are stubborn and inflexible, too easily frustrated when reality resists our first solution. We are dogmatic about matters to which we should be agnostic. We push processes forward, even when they do not make sense. We are too quick to judge situations and act on too little knowledge about what is really going on. These are the traits that get in our way. When we are successful, it is in spite of these traits, not because of them.

For designers, rare will be the case that doing nothing would be better than doing something. But to accept the possibility of that will draw us closer to the truth of every problem we seek to solve, and to a contentment with the constant change of the world that invites our intent as quickly as it invalidates i