If You Could Mentor Your Past Self: How would you have better prepared for 2020?

I am an expert procrastinator so it looks like my 2020 end-of-year digital office clean up is actually a 10 year file tidy. I found this 10 year old piece that I made as part of a teaching guide for students at Parsons. Most of this mindset still holds true, but I’m wondering what I would revise now that I have lived through THIS year. Likely more muscle on empathy, awareness of privilege and focus on community impact. Likely more urgency in my tone of voice and emphasis on drawing on the the power within, and challenging the power dynamics in play. Less about becoming a thoughtful designer and more about a thoughtful mindset.

If you looked 10 years into your work-self past, what would you find? What makes you cringe a little bit with your youthful naivete? What transcends time? 

My Approach To Design 

The thoughtful designer values the process as much as the product. From fuzzy front end thinking all the way to the execution of the project, it is important to manage expectations, the time-line and the budget. Use the experience of those involved to your advantage and find opportunities to learn and grow.

CURIOSITY:

The thoughtful designer values a curious spirit. Important questions we need to ask ourselves are, how do we make sense of the world? How do we make the world a better place? We poke, look, sniff, scan, touch, gather, listen, observe, sort. From this we try to understand the content and the context- the who, what, where, when, why and how’s of the situation. Curiosity also relies on an open and challenged mind. It is important to work, live and play in spaces that inspire, and to surround yourself with people who motivate you.

SENSIBILITY:

The thoughtful designer is sensible. Success of a process and product is dependent on continual evaluation, interpretation, and critique by both the makers and the stakeholders. Successes are measured, failures are noted. Based on the design process and outcome, everyone has learned anywhere from a bit to a lot and will pass this knowledge on. This is how we teach, motivate, mentor and enrich the lives of others with what we know and what we have learned. We continue to overlap our work with other disciplines to seek new patterns and discover new connections.

SIMPLICITY:

The thoughtful designer simplifies complexity. We expand our thoughts with our imagination. but focusing the information and formulating the problem is the ultimate goal. We question and analyze, make comparisons and connections. We try to find how experiences, spaces, products and systems are related. We communicate these ideas in a vision before we mobilize into action.

ACTION: 

The thoughtful designer values action. We experiment, test, engineer, make, do, use and execute. Perhaps many times. We laugh, play, invent, get frustrated. We ask for help. We facilitate others to take on larger tasks, or bigger risks. We value the culture and the craft of what it is we are making. Our goal is to make things happen. Make things better, make things beautiful. The end goal is to solve the problem with our action.