Being Designerly - The Power of Non-Technical Designer Skills

Designers today have many options to learn the craft of digital design - books, online courses, bootcamps, college courses, and mentoring. Prompted well, ChatGPT can even generate a syllabus to learn UX design at little to no cost, reducing barriers to learn design theory, process, and tools. Becoming a better designer requires continuous practice and dedication to improving your craft.

However, I firmly believe that everyone, designers and non-designers alike, can tap into the power of non-technical skills and behaviors to excel in their professional and personal lives. Successful designers have a toolbox of skills, behaviors, and habits that they actively use during the design process. These include skills like curiosity, empathy, and experimentation, to name a few. The good news is that anyone can reap the rewards of these designer-like skills, not only designers.

How can you unlock these benefits? Embrace a designer's mindset and adopt designer-like behaviors and habits. In other words, being designerly.

Being designerly is to be more creative by thinking, feeling & acting like a designer

I like to think of these designerly skills as related to head (thinking), heart (feeling), and hands (acting), as shown in the illustration above, surrounded by some overarching behaviors. Together, these skills, behaviors and habits can make us creative and innovative, and distinguish us from machines and technology like A.I.

I will be sharing excerpts over the coming weeks from a work-in-progress book about these designerly skills. You should also sign up for curated content on the topic every other week at news.beingdesignerly.com. I hope these will help you, designer or not, to be more creative and innovative by being designerly.

No, I didn’t coin the term designerly - design researcher and educator Nigel Cross first used the term to refer to underlying patterns of how designers think and act in “Designerly Ways of Knowing."