Allow me a gross overgeneralization (and know that it won’t be the last): we tend to be woefully under-read as a community. We prefer designing over reading (and, to a degree, rightfully so!), especially if said reading is less practical and prescriptive and more—eugh—theoretical (that undeservedly dirty word). We have a tendency to identify design as action, miscategorize everything else as inaction, and glorify things accordingly.
But this isn’t going to be about that. I promise.
Instead, this is about how, when we do read, we tend to read almost entirely about design and the tangential bits that orbit it closely.
We soak in Medium posts and product design blogs, books on typography and user research. We follow other designers on Twitter and Quora. We go to a set of conferences that, honestly, mostly feel pretty identical. For a field that talks its head off about cross pollination, we can be so passionate about design that it comes at the expense of the other fields that, well, provide the pollen.
This makes us myopic. It weakens our potential for growth, and, worse yet, our capacity to evolve in response to a constantly shifting world. We run the risk of becoming infatuated by our own mirror, only catching the genius outside of our field in little glimpses in our peripheral vision.
There are now troves of design texts, driven by numerous design publishers who devote themselves to producing amazing material highly relevant to what we do day by day. And we should read some of that. A lot of it, actually.
But, god damn, This is Water is one of the—no, the best consideration of empathy that I’ve ever encountered. And it’s a speech, not even about empathy really, more about day-to-day happiness, by a guy whose fiction circles tennis and drugs and entertainment and, hell, even advanced mathematics, but who never once directly calls out design or prototyping or typography or whether designers should code or “what is the material of interaction design” or—God help us—flat design.
Then consider that Stephen King’s On Writing is probably one of the best, frankest books that you will ever read about the creative process. That Christopher Alexander’s seemingly unrelated series of books on architecture and urban design (especially A Pattern Language) laid the path for our concept of a “design pattern.” And that Dick Buchanan, godfather of Carnegie Mellon’s design program, found in Aristotle’s classical rhetoric (and definitions of logos, ethos, and pathos) parallels to design that reshaped my own personal view of what design actually is.
So read. Read, read, read. Read fiction. Read nonfiction. Read voraciously, without prejudice, and without guilt if what you read has nothing to do with design. Because maybe it actually does. And you may not realize it now, or maybe even three years from now. But one day, just maybe, an adventurous neuron with a mind of its own will make some wholly unexpected jump over to a long-lost datum, a story, a metaphor that you encountered years ago, and it will bridge that with the problem that’s relentlessly and viciously smacking you in the face 9–5 Mon–Fri and you will practically swagger into work the next day a changed fucking designer because your perspective of design has evolved into something previously unknown to you, unique to you and the collection of metaphors that you’ve accumulated over your own unique path in life. And that’s where the good stuff happens, where your self-identity as a designer is born.
Ray Bradbury once prescribed a bedtime ritual for aspiring young writers: every night, read one short story, one essay from a divergent field, and one poem. In doing so, you quickly accumulate a treasure trove of metaphors for use in your own work. Smart guy, that Ray Bradbury. Maybe we should listen to him.
By the way, isn’t it that time of year where we make resolutions for ourselves?
