Designers (and Those Who Think Like Them) Make a Difference

I’ve heard people discuss design communities as insular, catty bunches. Some are, it’s true – but most designers I’ve met, especially in this community, show sincere interest in preserving and respecting beauty and the environment, in improving the quality of people’s lives.

Last night I had the pleasure of listening to journalist and author Warren Berger at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Berger’s new (and well-received) book, Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life, and Maybe Even the World began as an investigative project to dig around in the minds of designers to figure out how they came to certain ideas and how they tackle problems – and then bring that conversation to an audience of non-designers.

The book covers a lot of ground and goes deep. Some of Berger’s topics are familiar territory, such as the ideas of Designer Bruce Mau and the blooming industry of biomimicry. He spent time discussing how designers are always doing the darnedest things – they’re hoarders and huddlers, they draw while they talk, and the best ones watch people for clues and subtext rather than listen because “people can’t always tell you what they need.”

Berger collected doodles from the designers he interviewed, and said they express solutions best visually. 

And he got into specific examples where one “a-ha” design fixes something that generations have struggled with without solving or even questioning. Deborah Adler, for example, re-designed prescription bottles, which Target now uses, to be legible and color-coded for each family member:

…Van Phillips, who designed the Flex-Foot prosthetic that allowed him (and many others) to run competitively after losing a limb:

…and Gauri Nanda, whose Clocky alarm clock goes the extra mile – after one snooze, the clock begins rolling around the room looking for a place to hide, so the sleeper has to get up and chase it.

If you ask me, sheer brilliance.

Berger’s book is full of pointed anecdotes and visual examples of how things become easier through design breakthroughs. His larger point is that designers find elegant solutions through questioning what others accept as reality – that prescription bottles must be round and hard to read, or that an amputee will never run again, or that the only way to get up for class is through pure force of will.

A couple more insightful nuggets from Berger:

• It’s OK to fail, everyone does. But when you do, “fail forward” – that is, learn and adapt from each experiment, rather than just chucking the lot.
• Focus energy on recombining existing ideas – there may not be any totally original ideas under the sun, but there are always untried combinations for old ones.
• Look at the world around you as a working draft, and always carry a pen.