Being Designerly: Keep Learning

In this series about Being Designerly, we explore ways to be more creative by thinking, feeling, and acting like a designer. In previous articles, we discussed designerly behaviors and skills such as Putting People First, Being Curious, Being Observant, Thinking Critically, Having Empathy, Advocating for Users, Working Transparently, Communicating Visually, Collaborating & Co-Creating, and Experimentation. The last one in this series is about always learning.

Keep Learning: the ongoing process of acquiring new knowledge, skills, and experiences.

Designers have had to learn and evolve continuously. Digital design has evolved since the web was publicly available in the 1990’s to today. From designing static desktop websites, to simple mobile interfaces for flip phones, to touchscreen devices, voice, and even the metaverse. Besides designing for new interfaces, there’s the learning curve for new tools. Learning and adapting continually is not limited to designers alone; it can be even more critical for others – like medical professionals. Whether or not a formal requirement, everyone can and should keep learning to keep developing personally and professionally.

People learn differently – and we live in an age when there are resources to suit your learning style. Books? You’re not bound to physical books – you can have a library on a tablet. Visual or audio learner? There’s a YouTube video or a podcast on a topic you are interested in. Prefer more structured or formal learning? There are online courses, live training, learning cohorts and real-world classes. Take your pick – but learn. How can you make learning a habit? Here are 4 things you can do

Adopt A Growth Mindset

To be open to learning, adopt a growth mindset over a fixed mindset. That means believing that your abilities and skills can be developed and improved by working on them. Even prodigies with innate talent have succeeded by developing and honing their talent and skills over time through hard work, practice, persistence, and dedication to their fields.

Cultivate Curiosity

The first designerly behavior of the head is curiosity – cultivate broad and narrow curiosity. Review the suggestions in that chapter to develop and sustain broad curiosity on a breadth of topics, as well as narrow curiosity focused on a specific area.

Make Time To Learn

Only you can carve out time in your daily life to learn, reflect, and think. Benjamin Franklin spent at least an hour a day, five days a week, to learn something new. That five-hour rule is a good practice, but if that seems like a lot, start small. 10-20 minutes a day with a book, book summary, or a TED Talk are ways to explore different topics before dedicating more focused time to learning something that interests you from a trusted source. And no, you don’t have to wake up at 5 am to do that. It could be during a break, lunch, or winding down for the day.

Share

Learning will help you improve, but sharing will help others and you. Sharing your learning can be as easy as forwarding useful content or tagging someone in a post; or you could repost it with your thoughts and comments. If you’re up for it, write and publish a post or an article with your point of view on a topic you learned or putting to practice.

Keep learning to keep growing personally and professionally!

This is the last post in the series about Being Designerly. Over the past six months we discussed designerly skills related to the head (thinking), heart (feeling), and hands (acting), as shown in the illustration above, surrounded by the overarching behavior of putting people first and the habit of learning.

I hope these excerpts from the draft of my book on this topic has been, and will continue to be, helpful in being more creative. If you enjoyed this series, or learned something, please share these with others. And if you haven’t already, sign up for curated content on the topic every other week at news.beingdesignerly.com. I hope these will help you, designer or not, be more creative and innovative by being designerly!