So you want to become a better designer? Travel.

Right before my Senior year at Penn started, I was on a two week vacation with a close friend to London, Amsterdam and Norway. We had planned the trip spontaneously, purchasing our tickets (using miles, thank god) only two weeks before our flight took off from JFK.

To leave Philadelphia behind for just two weeks was all I needed. Having never been to Europe, not only was I excited to experience the culture, the food, and meet new people, but to also gain a better understanding of how and why these specific parts of Europe function the way they do. And to leave behind the pixels, the wireframes, the task-flows to focus on designing past web or native apps would help me foster my creative thinking beyond the screen itself.

A different approach

It was extremely eye opening to see how other parts of the world approach problem-solving given economic, political, and social constraints that vary across the country. For example, in the US, we’re slowly transitioning to using chip-only card readers, but we still struggle with some places requiring payment via chip versus using the strip. In virtually all of Europe, however, pretty much every credit card reader only accepted the chip as a form of payment. It was initially confusing, but I adapted quickly. And to state an obvious example, European outlets accept different plugs than in the US.

Another great example of a cultural difference between the US and Amsterdam is the prominence of bikes. In Amsterdam, there are apparently more bikes than there are people (which is fantastic, I’m a biking fanatic) because that’s primarily how everyone commutes. As a result, many everyday things are designed around the bike culture. In the train stations, for example, they had bicycle ramps for individuals to roll their bikes up and down stairs with ease while still walking up the stairs.

The bike wheels slide neatly into the grooves on the right.

Another ingenious design could be found in (one of) Amsterdam’s grocery stores. A supermarket near our hostel had created a “post-cashier-scanned-item” conveyor belt with a divider that moved items of different customers to adjacent sides. This is a brilliant idea: I can’t emphasize how many times I’ve seen and encountered a situation where there was a hold up because a customer in front had to put their items into a bag one by one. This design is especially effective when large quantities of items are purchased — not only does it save time for the cashiers and customers, but money for the business. Because we all know that time = money.

I didn’t take a picture of the check out system, but here’s a diagram of the design above.

Closing Thoughts

So what does this all mean? As I continued my travels throughout London, Amsterdam, and Norway, I would take note of the design of almost anything that’s aimed to solve a particular problem. It forced me to become more empathetic, to understand cultural, economic, and social constraints that surround the design of every day things.

Ultimately, it allowed me to foster my creativity in design by looking through lenses that I would have otherwise not discovered. According to Adam Galinsky, a professor at Columbia’s School of Business, “new sounds, smells, tastes, languages, sights, and experiences will spark different synapses in the brain, resulting in an increase in cognitive flexibility” . In other words, this “cognitive flexibility” allows us to think about solutions more broadly, to make anomalous connections between things, to think more creatively.

Whether you’re a designer or not, traveling abroad and going outside of your comfort zone allows you to become more empathetic, a trait not only required for good designers but also good people.