This is my design philosophy, polished across years:
- I believe curiosity is the most important thing when you work with any product or project. And this principle is important far beyond any professional context. If you think you know everything, it just means that you are professionally dead already.
- It is important to know more than is needed to solve the task and to make more than requested. It is essential to understand what you do and why you do it.
- There is no “designer” role anymore. The designer must be both a systems analyst and a business analyst, a domain expert, have knowledge about technologies, and so on. It means that all these roles should be developed enough to identify and bridge the gaps.
- Design is communication.
- Design is collaboration.
- Design is critical thinking. “New” doesn’t always mean “best”, “ugly” doesn’t always mean “bad”, not all the traditional stuff should be digitized, and so on. But solid arguments are needed to distinguish knowledge from beliefs.
- Theory and practice match only in theory. The real world is much more complex than any model.
- Anything can be improved with any available resources and technologies. The only question is whether it is really needed or if you can create something more important.