Spoiler alert: reading literature can make you a better designer
Throughout four years of university, nothing made my stomach squirm more than the question “What do you study?”, because of the inevitable follow-up question: “What are you going to do with that?”
My decision to study English literature was a corner I had to fight nearly every time I met someone new. But since I’ve started working at Fluxx, I’ve come to realise that through reading literature, you can learn things that are not directly teachable. Here are three skills essential to design that I’ve learnt from loving, and living within, books.
Empathy
In 2013, two psychologists from the New School for Social Research proved that reading literature improves the ability to empathise. David Kidd and Emanuele Castano presented around 1000 participants with a list of authors and asked them to point out the ones they recognised. Some, like Toni Morrison, are considered ‘literary’ writers, and others, like Danielle Steel, are considered to be ‘genre’ writers. Participants then did the ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes’ test, developed to assess how well an individual can read others’ emotions.
Participants who indicated a greater exposure to literary fiction performed better on the test, even accounting for demographic variables and self-reported empathy. Genre fiction did not have the same effect, likely because plot-driven stories use archetypal characters to help the reader understand what’s going on.
On the other hand, characters in literary fiction are like real people — multifaceted, hypocritical, and (often) unreliable. Castano and Kidd say this ‘prompts readers to make, adjust, and consider multiple interpretations of characters’ mental states’. Reading forces us to understand someone else’s perspective, even without realising that we're doing so.
In my most recent project at Fluxx, I found myself immersed in the world of video games. We met people in their homes, sat on their couches and looked at their Minecraft creations. We were clueless customers looking for gifts, and we were hardcore gamers at a Comic Con-like event. I haven’t touched a console since I was 6 years old, but I found myself in an eBay bidding war over a Nintendo 64. Perhaps the most valuable thing we learned is that, contrary to what we and our client assumed, many gamers wouldn’t call themselves gamers — it’s entertainment, not part of their identity.
We are the first-person narrators of our own stories, and that makes it easy to categorise others, to put them into boxes, but taking an empathetic approach means understanding others — not in relation to yourself (or your business), but as individuals. This skill is invaluable to designers, who build new products and services with empathy at the foundation.
Read this: The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño. The novel explores the perspectives of over 40 narrators, each of whom is based on someone Bolaño met at some point in his life.
Reading Between the Lines
In my first week at Fluxx, I found myself doing the same thing that I had done throughout four years of university. Trawling through several transcribed interviews, I searched for patterns, picked out notable quotations, and linked them together to form an insight.
The only difference between analysing design research and analysing a novel is that in the former, the people are real.
Even when we read for pleasure, a great book will still kindle analytical thought — however subconsciously — because, as we read, we continuously gather clues that help us make sense of a character.
It surprises decision makers across many businesses that focus group participants’ statements, thoughts, and actions usually don’t align. But this doesn’t surprise designers, and it doesn’t surprise readers. Part of why we need to empathise is because we need to understand what people actually want, despite what they say they want.
Think of Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield notoriously hates all things ‘phony’, which gives the impression that he’s better than everyone around him — if he can spot the phonies, then surely he’s the genuine one.
But Holden is a hypocrite: movies are phony, but he goes to the cinema; he mocks his peers’ phony ways of speaking, but he has his own affectations; people who seem aware of their own mannerisms are phony, but he calls himself an exhibitionist.
Like a real person, Holden lacks self-awareness. The key to what he really wants lies toward the end of the novel, when Holden rants about boys’ prep schools: ‘The guys that are on the basketball team stick together, the Catholics stick together, the goddam intellectuals stick together, the guys that play bridge stick together’. Not wanting to be vulnerable, Holden represses his desire to belong — it’s easier for him to believe that he doesn’t want to have friends, than to admit he struggles to make friends.
We only get to insights like this by looking past Holden’s image-crafting; desperate for friendship, Holden actively seeks to shape the reader’s opinion of him.
In this way, our relationship with Holden is like our relationship with research participants. There are many articles on why focus groups don’t work, and almost all cite people’s desires to enhance their image as well as a lack of self-awareness.
In 2003, AOL saw a gaping inconsistency between what male users said and what they did. In focus groups, men wouldn’t concede that they couldn’t control their laptops. But the same men complained via email — a more private medium — that their underperforming spam blockers were driving them crazy. These men, unwilling to appear incompetent, withheld information even though they knew their own needs and pains.
On the other hand, Sony’s well-known boombox story shows how we’re often unable to relate our preferences. Sony’s pre-launch focus groups unanimously reported that they wouldn’t buy plain black boomboxes. When colourful boomboxes didn’t sell well, Sony organised more focus groups. The participants still said they wanted colour, but at the ends of the sessions, they were offered a free boombox in any colour of the Sony spectrum. Every single person chose black.
Like many fictional narrators, people are simply unreliable, whether because of our egos, our desire to be liked, or a lack of self-reflection. Read more to get better at reading through others.
Read this: The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers. Frankie Addams is like Holden in her lack of self-awareness, adolescent narcissism, and desire to fit in.
The Importance of Context
No one exists in a vacuum. That’s why designers talk to customers in relevant spaces — homes, shops, parks, or wherever else they may use a particular product or service. But the wider context is as important as the immediate one. How will technological advances impact behaviour? What about a tumultuous political year? Shifting demographics?
On the surface, The Great Gatsby is a love story about a man who dedicates his life to the pursuit of a lost love. But context is key to understanding the illusive Gatsby.
If the novel had a different context, the story could have been an American Dream success story, where poor James Gatz works hard, acquires wealth and respect, and marries Daisy. But the novel takes place after World War One, as the American ethos of the self-made man is crumbling. That ethos — born of a religious work ethic — has no place in a traumatised society disillusioned with religion. At the same time, wartime factories are being repurposed for consumer-focused production, leading to a culture obsessed with things.
Gatsby is a product of this society. He’s a parody of the American self-made man in that he literally makes himself: he gives himself a new name, fabricates his own history, and pulls himself up by his bootstraps through a life of crime. In this gilded age obsessed with surfaces and indifferent to what lies beneath, Gatsby uses props (cars, photographs, medals), costumes (metallic suits, piles of shirts), and a faux-British way of speaking to project an ‘Old Money’ image that is valued over depth of character.
If we don’t consider context in The Great Gatsby, we can’t fully understand who he is. By reading more and continuously considering context, we become better at communicating how that context can affect people.
I recently stumbled upon an article about why American businesses fail in China. Home Depot, a home improvement supplies retailer, serves a real need in a country full of DIY hobbyists. The Fortune 500 company decided to expand to China in 2006, due to what they believed was a similar socio-economic and cultural climate; China has ‘a growing middle class, millions of new homeowners, and a culture of everyday ingenuity and thrift’.
But Home Depot struggled for the better half of a decade, and finally shut its remaining doors in 2012.
The problem was that they didn’t really understand the context and its impact. A DIY mentality is deeply ingrained in the U.S., stemming from ideals (like self-reliance) that are core to the American Dream. This doesn’t quite exist in the Chinese Dream, which focuses more on the collective nation than the individual.
And, more obviously, labour is so cheap in China that people are happy to hire a handyman.
Read this: Trumpet by Jackie Kay. Look out for how Colman is affected by shifting notions of British identity.
In sum…
Designers are storytellers, so it makes sense that we can learn through exposure to other stories. London-based entrepreneur and literature graduate Alex Stephany says, ‘Building clear narratives into design helps you carry a user on a story with you — until they’re a customer’. In order to build these clear narratives, you must first practice empathy, reading between the lines, and interpreting the effects of context.
For more articles like this, follow Fluxx on Medium or subscribe to our newsletter. And if you’d like to share your thoughts or get more book recommendations, email me at ariel.lerner@fluxx.uk.com.
