I’m a Thief and You Should Be Too

I published an article in the PDMA Visions Magazine this month talking about how much there is to learn from other disciplines and fields that can improve your ability to collect information to help your design. Many professionals in the design field only look inside of their discipline for methods and techniques, and they are missing out. Techniques used in fields such as marketing, advertising and the social sciences are useful for better understanding people and their needs that would add value to anyone’s tool kit of methods.

When I do find other "thieves" out there, I find out they are not very good. To use a real world example, there are people who spend their effort trying to figure out how to carry a refrigerator out of the house instead of focusing on the items that would be the easiest to carry and fence. Too many people who borrow methods from other disciplines do so in a an inefficient way and often times never fully understand how it can be used and adapted to their needs.

In the article, I highlight several tips for how to borrow methods:

• Keep your eyes open
• Everything you read and see can be an inspiration for a new method
• Spend some time in other disciplines worlds – Attend conferences, build relationships, and learn from experts in other disciplines and fields
• Don’t go it alone – use your colleagues to help you apply the methods in the best way that will meet their needs
• Try it at a basic level first – Don’t bite off too much when you’re trying to adapt a method from another field to yours