Does intuition matter?
Have you ever considered yourself an intuitive designer? Or is the idea of intuition something that you consider as disconnected from the design profession? Something to be wary of? Or something to be used and celebrated in your design practice?
In Season 8 of Catching The Next Wave podcast, we’ve decided to dig into the topic of intuition. I’ve been having an on / off relationship with intuition in my professional practice as experience designer for years and the two of us couldn’t quite come to terms with each other.
Intuition seems to be a topic that has many interpretations and therefore, perhaps, is not as well understood (by me and probably also others). I had an impression that it is something intangible, a gut-feeling that comes not from logic and analytical thinking but from subconscious interlinking of things that I’ve seen and heard in the past. this is why I was a little cautious of it as I was worried it is a way of thinking that is dramatically prone to cognitive biases and other traps of System 1 thinking (as Daniel Kahneman calls it). At the same time I was observing that whenever I dared to reach out and allow my intuitive thinking have a voice, the results were more than satisfactory. What was going on?
There is a huge number of insights that I got from the eight amazing conversations in this season with a psychiatrist-philospher-congnitivist in one, an actor, a writer, a visual artist, two designers and two leadership coaches but a few that clarify this particular issue for me.
Firstly, I realized that I misunderstood intuition terribly. It is not an illogical process based on data I have no control of. It is, in fact, a natural process of my brain that collects my past experiences to see the links I might not be able to discover in a conscious process. In fact, if you think about the ultimate experts (often called the gurus of a given field), their immense insight doesn’t come from the last project or last 10 interviews they conducted. It comes from this intuitive, subconscious ability to see links among things a less experienced person may not be able to spot. So, it is based on data, logic and, above all, ability to make connections where others are not quite able to make them. Actually, if you think about it, the complexity of the world we design for is often too much to be captured in a single study (as one of our guests, Bernt Meerbeek points out). Any expert on your team who is asked for advice is doing nothing less but applying intuition to the most recent data set to see what meaning can be deduced from it (this is why it is crucial to have senior designers on board).
The second insight trashed my preconception that intuition is a fast process. Surely, it can manifest itself as an instant realization of how to act in a given circumstance but it can also be a slow process. I spotted it when I was writing “The Umami Strategy”. It was a process of slowly unpacking my intuitive insights collected over a decade of design practice and dressing them up in words that made logical train of thoughts. This realization made me also see that intuition doesn’t equal cognitive bias. It can. in fact, be a way to get us out of some of those biases (although maybe we don’t want to be devoid of our biases, which is a topic for another article, I guess).
Finally, I realized that we are “untrained” to be intuitive in our thinking and our design practice. We believe in data, and more data as a way to inform decisions. While there is nothing wrong with collecting, interpreting and applying data, it is a path that might constrain any creative insight that is not rooted in “facts”. Yet, as I mentioned before, the upside of intuitive thinking is that we allow ourselves to figure out connections between “facts” that are not straightforwardly obvious or easily explained. This is where innovation lies, this is where you are able to create something that is not standard.
So, if I were to sum up this amazing season on Catching The Next Wave, I would say: we should think of how we can teach smart intuitive thinking to designers and researchers. It is not one over the other, which basically means that I am not advocating intuitive design only. But I strongly believe that in the complex world that we find ourselves in, it is good to apply all of our skills to create powerful designs. And intuition can be such a superpower.
Aga Szóstek, PhD is an experience designer with over 19 years of practice in both academic and business world. She is an author of “The Umami Strategy: stand out by mixing business with experience design”, a creator of tools supporting designers in the ideation process: Seed Cards and the co-host in the Catching The Next Wave podcast.
