How can mindfulness make you a better designer?

2019-10-01T17:00:00-04:00

As designers, we often are presented with an overwhelming amount of data to accompany a design problem. There are the client desires, the code constraints, zoning, the desires of the design team, materials, structural systems, and the list goes on. Sometimes, we can feel bombarded or crippled from receiving too much info. Where do I start? We might think to ourselves.

Nadia Surtees, a design researcher at IDEO makes a case for taking a mindfulness approach in our design thinking. "Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the fathers of modern mindfulness, describes the practice as 'paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally,'" she writes. She goes on to list 5 ways she and her colleagues at IDEO go about using mindfulness to tackle tough projects:

"Adopt a beginner's mindset." According to Surtees, a beginner's mindset means "starting fresh, assuming nothing, and living the question." It can be tempting to assume we have the answer to something or to draw on our prev...

Pro Tips on sketching for virtual reality

2017-01-31T19:57:00-05:00

In any great hack, speed and convenience reduce formerly tedious, mind-numbing tasks into relatively easy operations. This appears to be the case with Volodymyr Kurbatov's tips on hand sketching numerous POVs/scenarios for virtual reality simulations. He breaks down the process with helpful diagrams and downloadable templates, explaining in his distinctive syntax:

I’m an old fashion guy who likes taking the pencil first.

So I tried to use 360 panorama grid to align my sketches to wide angle view. It was looking not very spectacular, till I scanned it and put on my face.

And it is working! So I’ll be glad to share my process step by step.

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How can mindfulness make you a better designer?

Pro Tips on sketching for virtual reality