As designers there is a careful line to walk between taking over a design, disempowering our stakeholders and often losing our voice at the table, and being limp lettuce – merely executing the instructions of others.
But how do you find that sweet-spot?
Here’s an insightful quote from Jonathan Ive, (VP Industrial Design at Apple) from AIXS magazine. And it starts with one of my favourite characteristics – inquisitiveness.
Q: What is important for designers in a company that has been as successful as Apple?
A: Being inquisitive. Being genuinely interested in learning and being genuinely interested in being proved to be wrong. If someone says something just can’t be done you have to learn a lot to have an intelligent debate to find out whether that really is the case or not. You can’t confuse dogma with being resolute. You have to maintain the sprit of inquiry. You mustn’t get stuck on a particular approach in the early stages of your idea but you have to be resolute as you start to refine an idea so that it can make the transition from just an idea into a real product.
