The Most Valuable Tool to Seek as a New Designer 🔨

By: Victoria Vandenberg, Visual Interaction Designer at SnapPea Design

Welcome to my TED Talk 👋🏽

Bias may exist, considering my fixation with the absorption of knowledge — whether tacit or codified, but I could be on to something here. This is for the Designers in the room (the people tasked with the casual responsibility of understanding the past, present, and future needs of all business, technological, and human resources involved). Quite frankly, I think this responsibility pairs wonderfully with the absorption of knowledge; adding credibility, humanity, context, perspective, ethics, and feasibility to design.

But how do we acquire the skills, theories, and frameworks that industry experts consider as common knowledge? The remainder of this article will focus on answering this question.

In Design School, you are taught about smart collaboration, dynamic environments, and constraints… Or at least, on a theoretical level, you are. Earlier this year, I graduated from the University of Waterloo’s Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business at the age of 23 and started work the following week at SnapPea Design — an IoT and Strategy Design firm in Kitchener’s Catalyst 137.

The final months of my degree hosted job interviews from companies ranging from three to 500+ employees. A fruitful starting salary nor physical location guided my decision. The primary criteria ended up being, “exposure to knowledge”. This initially caught me off guard, considering our societal fixation on coupling money with success.

What does “exposure to knowledge” mean exactly? It refers to being exposed to the processes, idiosyncrasies, and systems of the development, operations, and innovation practices of different industries. An investment in exposure to information for young Designers is critical, considering the application of knowledge is your power in a generalized economy. Exposure could be through working on projects spanning industries, working within diverse teams, and/or curiously synthesizing snippets of information you gather.

Moore’s law is still alive and well, which implies that a constant state of learning and development is critical to staying relevant and applicable to the workforce. Although typical education streams lead the new workforce into siloed areas of expertise, the needs of the 21st century are “one-upping” that idea. Generalists who were traditionally undermined in the uprise of the Information Era, are redefining their role in the age of artificial intelligence to ensure our systems are built holistically, thoughtfully, and ethically.

Generalist Knowledge is the New Vogue 💥

The notion of the polymath dates back to the Renaissance, translating to “having learned much” and greats such as Da Vinci, Michaelangelo, and Aristotle all fall within its realms. The term emphasizes the coupling and cohesion of typically differing skill sets or industries and a consequent ability to combine them in ingenious ways. The wider the array of your knowledge, the more heightened your ability to recognize patterns becomes. David Epstein touches on the significance of experimentation in his book (which I highly recommend), Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.

“Experimentation is as reliable a route to expertise as early specialization.” — David Epstein

Epstein strengthens this idea by explaining how the heightened complexity of the world we live in has increased average IQs and people’s ability to think abstractly. Such a view denotes a really interesting opportunity for new Designers to recalibrate their focus to the acquisition of applicable knowledge (applicable referring to both theoretical and technical skills), as opposed to instantly funnelling to a particular outlet. Technologies change, but historical information to build insights and concepts upon does not.

Off to the Design Studio 💡

Half a year ago, I started my first day on the job as an Interaction Designer for SnapPea Design (SnapPea). Our owners, to explain it lightly, approach design differently. Our studio motto reinforces such, “Every great product starts with an argument”. I kid you not. It’s incredibly intimidating at first but once you start to become comfortable with ambiguity and adversity, you begin to see a change in the quality of your designs and your ability to articulate the reasoning behind your design decisions.

SnapPea works on every part of a design cycle. A CEO or Product Team can come to us with an idea, and in-house we can develop their strategy, design their hardware and software in a way that focuses on manufacturability, and tie it all up with a bow of thoroughly-conducted exploratory research, thoughtful user experiences, and a delightful visual language. We’re a one-stop-shop. To add to the wonder that is SnapPea, there are only 12 people on our team.

Unlike most studios, I’ve realized that we don’t always do what our clients want, which lead to the inauguration of our followup catchphrase,

“We’re kind of a pain in the ass.” — Steve Fyke

If our research or niche expertise push design in a particular direction, we will build the strength of the story and data to support it, and not shy away from a tough conversation with our client.

Consequently, I’ve turned myself into the human form of a sponge. The members on this team have over 100 years of product experience and their backgrounds include Systems Design Engineering, Human-Computer Interaction, Industrial Design, Business Administration, Graphic Design, and Mechanical Engineering. You’re also given a larger breadth of tasks when you offer many services with minimal staff. Here’s the Cole’s Notes list of tasks I’ve worked on since starting:

A studio is basically a fulltime version of your Design School capstone research projects on a daily and client-focused basis. It’s unreal. As opposed to fitting into a niche right off the bat, it allows you to gather knowledge and frameworks into your tool kit from people with different professional and educational backgrounds and to develop deep understandings of technical feasibility, human desirability, and business viability. An understanding of technical requirements is particularly beneficial. It doesn’t matter how strong the story is if it is too technically complex or out of scope to design. This has hands down been one of the strongest virtues I’ve learned at SnapPea. The team at SnapPea isn’t kidding when it comes to technical requirements… They know their stuff.

Why why why why why? 🤔

Why is this important? There are four main takeaways for the new Product Designer trying to decide where to work.

1. The world is becoming less specialized and more generalized. 🌏Gathering an understanding of different systems and how they interconnect will be one of the strongest tools in your toolbelt. Plus, if you keep adding to it, it will stay relevant in innovation standards.
2. The breadth of and access to resources, is the gift that keeps on giving. 📚It adds context, humanity, and feasibility to your designs. Whether this knowledge is accessed through people, books, classes, or online forums… Seek it. Understand it. Make something meaningful out of it. And apply it.
3. Knowledge gathering for pattern recognition and context. 🧶 The more information you are exposed to, the better you will get at filtering, funnelling, and organizing to the most important elements. This is a critical skill for a Designer as you’ll be able to recognize patterns and create insights from data coming from different domains.
4. There’s a vulnerability in saying, “I’m not overly acquainted with the topic, would you mind elaborating a bit further?” 🧨 At some point or another, every one of us has been navigating in the first days of our career. I quickly learned that most Senior All-Stars will be more than happy to share their expertise with you.

Conclusion: The Future Belongs to the Polymath 💥

As the complexity and interconnectedness of our systems continue to increase at a rapid rate, it adds to the importance of relationships. Relationships are the intersection of domains that enables innovation. Understanding how relationships exist, why they’re significant, their technical composition, their consequent meaning, and their application to already existing systems.

As Moore’s law begins to hit the highly upward trend of its curve and research labs continue to study the means in which technology can understand the most minuscule crevasses of our minds and cells of our body; it has become more imperative than ever to understand relationships of systems and this starts with seeking information. Read, seek, listen, practice, create, debate, tinker, question, develop, and synthesize.

I’ll leave you with the following introspective questions:

1. What are your domains of knowledge seeking? 📖 Where do they relate? For instance, mine are systems, environmental sustainability, behavioural economics, and magic moments. These will be your guiding stars for knowledge seeking.
2. What do I know and what do I seek? 🎓Having a list of what you understand will give you the mental warrant to ask questions when exposed to environments where there is new information. You’ll also have a better vision of what you want to learn. This will focus the intentionality of your curiosity.
3. What theoretical knowledge do I have and what technical skills do I have? 🖥 Theory isn’t extraordinary without a method of output, nor is technical creation useful without direction or purpose. Your toolkit doesn’t need to reach equilibrium, but abilities on both sides of the spectrum will allow you to be self-sustaining. The ability to bring ideas to life is just as important as the ability to come up with bright ideas.

And remember,

“Design is built on context. Context is enabled by awareness. And awareness stems from exposure to and retention of knowledge.”

Let your curiosity drive you. Best of luck with your upcoming journey! Now, go gather your puzzle pieces. 🧩

If you’re looking to learn more about SnapPea Design or how we could work together please feel free to reach out:

victoria@snapppeadesign.com 📗