Learning a Language Strengthens the Creative Process

How studying a foreign language strengthens the muscles of flexibility, empathy and humility needed for the creative process

By Samara Watkiss, Senior Interaction Designer, frog

There seems to be no end to the personal and professional benefits of learning a foreign language. Scientific researchers will tell you how it can make you smarter, better able to solve problems and less likely to suffer from Alzheimer's later in life. Business coaches will tell you speaking a foreign language creates the ability to connect with clients who are native speakers, to conduct business more comfortably abroad, and to open new possibilities for clients, colleagues and research participants. As a designer at frog — an international consultancy with studios on three continents and clients around the world — these are huge benefits. But studying a foreign language, I believe, is especially valuable to those of us doing innovative and human-centered design because it strengthens the muscles we need for the creative process — and those benefits are true at any level of fluency. Specifically, studying a foreign language increases the flexibility, empathy and humility necessary to be a designer.

Flexibility

Language is the fundamental mental model. It is the abstraction into which we organize our reality. A famous tenant of linguistic anthropology, the Sapir-Wohrf hypothesis, states that the structure of our language determines or greatly influences how we are able to think about the world. In other words, language is not merely descriptive of what is, it shapes our perception of what is. When you begin to study a foreign language, you realize how arbitrary your linguistic mental model is, and that there are many other ways to bucket and understand the world around us. While it seems simple, this ability to imagine a different way of thinking about the world — that you might have hunger rather than be hungry or that you might have specific words and verb conjugations for two of something (examples from Spanish and Arabic, respectively) — strengthens our ability to reframe problems, and create new models to make sense of complexity. These skills make possible the kind of adductive leaps that are required for innovation.

Empathy

Studying a foreign language is frustrating. Intellectually you may know that not speaking a certain language is not a reflection on your intelligence, but my experience is when other people understand what is being said and I don’t, I feel foolish and vulnerable. And tired. Processing in a foreign language is mentally exhausting. Tasks that are easy in English, like simple math or remembering my favorite grade school teacher, are much more difficult when I’m asked to do them in a foreign language — and that’s just being in a language class. Add to this the experience of traveling somewhere where you aren’t fluent in the local language and trying to make decisions and navigate the systems around you.

These experiences allow us to empathize with users who find themselves in similarly taxing and frustrating places. Certainly, this is true if you are designing for a population who is working in a second language, or a partially literate population, but I believe it applies to many different populations. When we are designing for users who are frustrated because they are trying to navigate a system with unfamiliar legal or medical terms, or when users are trying to complete simple tasks while feeling the weight of big decisions or other mentally exhausting activities, we can draw on our experience with foreign languages to better support them.

Humility

I think of Humility as one’s willingness to be teachable and to be wrong. The best way to learn a foreign language is the same way children learn to speak. You attempt to communicate using incomplete sentences, improperly conjugated verbs and misplaced words. A good instructor, or parent, responds by speaking your phrase back to you corrected and continues the conversation. As a small child, this is perfectly natural, as an adult it can be embarrassing and paralyzing. But if you aren’t willing to make mistakes out loud, you won’t learn a new language. The creative process is like this. You have to share half-baked ideas, some which will turn out to be wrong and some which will need to be built upon by your colleagues, and you pass them back and forth.

At frog, one of most challenging and rewarding things we do is not just solve problems, but create spaces where our clients can be freed up from what they think they know (and the fear of being wrong) to generate new and innovative solutions to their own problems. Facilitating client workshops requires us to communicate a culture of humility to our clients where it is ok to be wrong, where we are all going to throw out ideas, ask questions and build together to make sense of new ideas. I recently had the opportunity to facilitate a client workshop with Spanish speaking clients. Our frog team ranged from native Spanish speakers to those who only knew a few words. Of course, the native speakers were invaluable when it came to necessary translations. But the non-native speakers who showed the humility to stumble their way through welcomes and introductions in broken Spanish also contributed to this crucial culture of collaboration, making our clients feel comfortable not only talking through complex ideas in their non-native English, but also sharing new ideas and jumping into the creative process.

Next Steps

I’m certainly not the only one excited about language study. In fact, in our Austin studio, we are currently exploring bringing Spanish classes into the office as a way to continue to develop our team and provide a unique benefit for both our employees and our clients. Not only are we looking forward to leveraging our bilingual capabilities as we continue to work with clients throughout Latin America, but we are also excited to see how these new skills help our multidisciplinary team continue to grow in the creative process.

As a Senior Interaction Designer, Samara brings strategic and creative problem solving together to achieve business goals, and improve experiences for users and employees. She is engaged in frog’s Healthcare and Org Activation practices and is passionate about designing a future that makes the benefits of technology and innovation accessible to everyone.