- Good designers are fast on their feet. A poor designer holds on to a failing parti. A good designer sees the erosion of the parti as an indicator of where the project should go next.
- Good designers aren’t afraid of throwing away good ideas. Not every good idea belongs to the current project.
- Be process-oriented, not product driven. This is a difficult, but important skill
- Seek to understand a design problem before solving it.
- Do not force-fit solutions to old problems to new ones.
- Do not be attached to ideas. Be slow to fall in love with ideas.
- Be holistic in design decisions.
- Make design decisions with the awareness they may not work out.
- Know when to change and when to stick with previous decisions.
- Accept as normal the anxiety that comes from not knowing what to do.
- Work fluidly between coarse and fine grain.
- Always ask what-ifs now matter how good the solution is.
- Strive for improving your design process more than improving your creative outputs.
- Engage with meta-thinking. Be mindful of your thought processes. Have an internal dialogue and critique yourself.
- The three levels of knowing
- Simplicity is engaging fully with the experience but only at a surface level.
- Complexity is viewing the underlying Complex Systems but being unable to appreciate the patterns and connections.
- Informed Simplicity entails pattern recognition.
- Less is More. Don’t clutter design.
- Less is a bore. Don’t make the piece boring
- No design system is or should be perfect. Oddities add enriching aspects. Break the rules as needed.
- Success is not defined by how flawless a piece is, but by the depth embodied within the work.
- Properly gaining control of the design process tends to feel like losing control of the design process. Design does not have predetermined outcomes.
- Manage your ego. Forget about what you want the building to be, ask what the building wants to be.
- Design with the larger context in mind.
- Limitations encourage creativity.
- Crisis = Danger + Opportunity. A design problem is not a problem but an opportunity. The best solutions do not make the problem go away, but accept the problem as a natural state of the world.
- The best way to get started is to just do something. Even the act of scribbling lets you learn more about the problem.
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