Why Designers know everything about knowing nothing.
With great questions comes great responsibility.
The best designer is not the one having all the right answers, but the one knowing all the right questions. As designers, we facilitate experts, interview users, research relationships, analyse behaviours and do a lot of other things for the quest of understanding and gaining knowledge.
We also connect dots, bridge departments, translate from one area to the other, map one context onto the next. We are messengers of fluid knowledge, carrying insights from various areas into whatever we are currently working on, from previous projects, from research we follow, or understanding we have gained by watching others do their work.
And yet, often times, we venture into projects with a profound feeling of knowing nothing at all. Why is that?
The Experts and the Questioners
As a designer working in the tech field, I meet a lot of experts on very specific and highly advanced areas, who know a lot about things I didn’t even know existed before I started to collaborate with them.
But even if I feel I need to start from scratch every time I enter another domain, it is crucial to bring a certain basic understanding of the current technological developments, if simply for speaking the same language as the people I am supposed to facilitate. And that means I need to read a lot about various different technical fields of significance, even though they are not my primary areas of expertise.
Enter the Dunning-Krüger Effect.
The Dunning Krüger Effect describes the correlation between one’s confidence in one’s own knowledge about something and one’s actual knowledge about this something. Basically, the less people know about a certain context, the more they think they understand it, because they are lacking the overview about what it is they don’t know (or understand).
As mentioned before, a good designer needs to have a really good understanding of what we don’t know. We need to have a grasp of the domain, its extent and its core struggles, and we need to know from where to attack it to solve a specific aspect relevant to our project.
So as a good designer, we don’t need to be experts in anything — except our craft — but amateur-experts in a lot of things.
Unfortunately that goes in line with a strong dip in confidence in our knowledge, an aspect that is even more highlighted when we collaborate with experts in that given field. And that plays into the often existing questioning of others as to why designers deserve a seat at the table.
Yet, it would be a waste for us to study any given area any further, since our job is not to know. It is to question. What we bring to the table is not an understanding of what we know, but a good understanding of what we don’t know. But we know that about a lot of different areas, probably far more than the experts sitting next to us at the table.
This aspect highlights another unfortunate side effect of this condition — working with people who have not reached the decline in the confidence curve. The people who still believe the area in question is far narrower than it is and believe to have a full grasp of it, even though they don’t — they just haven’t gotten far enough into it to understand what they don’t understand. Working with these unknowing not-knowers is exhausting, since breaking down anyones confidence in themselves is not a nice thing — and also not one that is welcomed — and is particularly hard when one doesn’t actually know that much either, just that tad more that makes one self-aware of that fact.
So, it is an unfortunate situation designers find themselves in — and it takes a whole lot of confidence, to not let the constant feeling of not-knowing get to your head.
Learning to live with it
So if you, as a designer, have ever felt like that within a project — utterly convinced that this new project focus is out of reach for your understanding, but also slightly annoyed by people who are convinced they understand it much better than you, even though you know they don’t — don’t worry. We have all been there. It comes with the job. And if you are self-aware and curious enough to see the boundaries of your knowledge and can’t wait to continuously venture beyond them — you are probably in the right job.
Trust me, I know what I am talking about. I am an expert.
Sonja is Head of UX and Co-Founder at the strategic innovation studio Block Zero. Interested in working with us? See more of what we do on blockzero.se or get in touch at hello@blockzero.se to find out how we use design research in client projects and our everyday work.
