Know Your Words: Why Reading Is The Absolute Best Thing A Designer Can Do
One of the most important things you need to do as a designer is read about your craft. Read about the philosophy, practice, and history of design. Consuming books on topics related to design and art provides you with fresh new perspectives on approaching and evaluating design problems, while teaching you about the design process as a whole and its many variations. More importantly, reading about design improves your design vocabulary.
The key here is how language shapes thought. Humans think and imagine based on things that they have already seen. Even those wild and far out thoughts are extrapolations from some base of your reality, or some analogy (or other model) you have mentally constructed with your words. In that way your language and vocabulary become a framework for your thought process. Language “is a powerful tool in shaping thought about abstract domains," and thus shapes the way you deal with design problems.
“When all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail.”
— Maslow's hammer
It is as the old adage says, when all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. By increasing your vocabulary and the number of ways you have to describe design concepts and perspectives, you are improving your mental tool box.
That is why designers are, and should be collectors. Designers are cultural scavengers that collect experiences and the objects that represent them. To quote Paul Rand: “the artist is a collector of things imaginary or real. He accumulates things with the same enthusiasm that a little boy stuffs his pockets. The scrap heap and the museum are embraced with equal curiosity.” The same should be said for collecting words and ways of describing. Your vocabulary, along with your experiences, form a framework for conceptualization. That means reading about varied perspectives on design, especially about ways of describing design related concepts, can help you produce better creative output, with the added bonus of being able to better communicate design to people of different backgrounds than your own.
Remember that words and descriptions are a map of reality, but the map is not the territory. Words are simply symbols we use to represent ideas of varying abstractness, so the more we have, the better off we are as designers.
P.S. You can follow me on Twitter @uxdiogenes.
