X, Y, Z-Axes of Designer’s Thought

When making a 3D model, designers will realize that to make it accurate, they need to consider three dimensions. Interestingly, I was surprised to find that this also applies to the realm of thought. The situation of interaction designers now is challenging, just like the mid-century industrial designers, who faced with numerous choices and new fields, so they must master the ability of interdisciplinary thinking. And that’s what contemporary interaction designers need.

X-axis: broaden your horizons. Only by constantly learning new knowledge can we ensure the innovative, critical and flexible thinking for design. For interaction designers, this aspect is particularly important. Not only to learn UI, UX, but also to study user psychology and sociology; to learn coding, programming; some industrial, interior design skills; even physics; materials; geography and history knowledge. The wider the understanding, the more value interaction designers can maximize.

Y-axis: learn to summarize the history and look into the future. “To look ahead one must learn to look back.”. This is a very enlightening point of view in Designing For People by Henry Dreyfuss (page 20). Dreyfuss discusses Leonardo da Vinci’s Thoughts on practicality and comfort in the Renaissance, so the author also forms a strong people-oriented design idea. This tells designers that history is a good teacher and should consider the future design direction on the basis of reviewing previous design experience.

Z-axis: keep thinking in depth. On the basis of the above two “axes”, interaction designers also need to have the ability of deep thinking. The z-axis is the key to make a plane stand out, just as the depth of thought is often the key to good design. Designers also need to combine the knowledge and experience of a wide range of fields in order to make valuable critical-thinking design and achieve innovation more effectively, and find their own style. Lack of depth, no matter how good-looking appearance is, the design is not complete.