How learning to parse criticism improves the design and designer

Photo by Richard Gatley

My article is slightly late this week. I've been travelling the last few days and by the time I got home yesterday I wasn't in any state to sit down and write. Despite the trip being overshadowed by several parties creating unrelated issues in an unrelated project, the trip itself was a good one. Everything went smoothly, including the actual transiting, and the outcomes of the trip were positive.

The purpose of my travel this week was to present our progress to an expert group who provided feedback on what we're doing and where we're up to with the project. This group is made up of about a dozen different experts from all over the world. While they all shared the same area of expertise, they all come with their own different approaches and opinions within this otherwise narrow field.

Later at dinner one of the experts asked me for my take on the outcomes of the meeting. Somewhat refreshingly, he was mindful that we'd been barraged by a dozen different opinions on what we've done to date and what we should do next. He was asking me if the criticism that came at us from all sides bothered me.

I assured him that as an Industrial Designer, you get used to having your work criticised. And once you get used to it, you get excited for feedback - both good and bad. You want your work criticised.

You learn to wear criticism like a jetpack.

Boosting Your Design Through Feedback

Early on in my career I remember criticism being tough to take. You put time and effort into something, especially something creative that is to some extent an expression of yourself, and then others come along and tell you what's wrong with it. It hurts.

It probably also doesn't help that as a young designer your work generally has more wrong with it than it does right.

Taking all different pieces of feedback and synthesising it into action is tough. Often conflicting requirements can make a clear path forward difficult; conflicting either with other feedback, or conflicting with your own internal goals. It can also put you in tricky situations when trying to reconcile the feedback against the stakeholders giving it.

Aside from the feeling of being told you've made a wrong choice, especially when we feel strongly about our choices, the difficulty in navigating feedback can cause us to create an aversion to it. Yet despite the difficulty, seeking feedback is one of the best ways to boost a design and your skills as a designer.

Learning how to seek out and manage criticism is an important skill for designers to learn; it's the primary vehicle to improving your work. As designers become both more skilled and more experienced, the work becomes higher quality and thus the feedback is both more targeted and you become better at digesting it.

Small Course Corrections

When collecting user needs, I've always been a strong proponent of collecting needs and testing assumptions early and often. The same goes for feedback. One of the biggest contributors that makes criticism hard to take is how much time and effort you invest into your creation prior to receiving feedback. The more you invest, and potentially the more you have to change, the tougher it can be to take criticism.

The simplest and most painless way to mitigate this is simply to get feedback sooner.

The sooner you seek out feedback, the less time you've invested into your chosen direction and the less philosophically and emotionally attached you will be. Seeking small criticisms often makes taking micro course corrects quicker and easier. Much better than trying to turn the whole battleship because you've gone too far down the wrong path.

This is how criticism becomes a jetpack. Taking on small amounts of criticism constantly means that within a margin of error, you're always going in the right direction. By not wasting energy going in the wrong direction, you're project takes the most direct route.

Of course you must seek quality criticism. As much as constructive criticism can accelerate your project, destructive criticism can stall it.

Constructive vs. Destructive

A useful analogy is sound waves. Where one sound wave is our own ideas, and criticism is an interfering sound wave. In sound there are two types of interference; constructive interference, and destructive interference.

As sound has both positive and negative pressure waves, when two identical waves are in phase you get constructive interference. This doubles the sound pressure. Likewise if feedback is constructive, and in sync with our own, this constructive criticism can double the impact on your project. That's not to say that the criticism must be in agreement, rather than the criticism must be trying to achieve the same objective; making your project (or your skill) the best it can be.

Conversely, when two identical sound waves are out of phase you get destructive interference. One wave obliterates the other. This is how noise cancellation works - eliminating sound by making the inverse sound. If feedback is destructive it can slow or stall your progress. That's not to say that destructive criticism is all bad, it just means that you must spend some time picking out what's good feedback from what's noise.

Choosing the right stakeholders for criticism can sometimes be just as important as the feedback itself. Sometimes you don't have a choice, but when you do, looking for those with the same objectives as your will progress you towards your goal faster and with less burden.

Jetpacks for Fun and Profit

As I told this expert over dinner, all the feedback, both good and bad, is exciting. It means we're moving the project forward in the right direction. The few criticisms we did receive are easy to understand in context and pick out what's constructive.

Like with all things, you get better with practice. Once you learn how to take criticism in your stride, it'll give a boost to the speed and quality of your work.