Design Feast Series: Quotes

“When we’re all put on this earth. We start out as visual people; language comes later, as a coding learned along the way. As you go through the education process, early on you’re more likely to look at pictures in books and learn visually—you take it all in, you see everything. Then as you begin to code things in words, it makes everything more linear and specific. At some point, within our education system, it seems like we shift from a balance of right and left hand brain, to being very left brain. The consequence of this is, if you go through all the important books they are really image free, they’re all words. But designers keep looking at the whole picture. I think this is the reason why designers are so welcome in the boardrooms of corporations. Businesspeople have been kind of brainwashed out of solving problems in anything other than a linear approach. But sometimes, we need both sides of the brain to solve problems. Which is why I find that there are times I can go into a boardroom with guys who have degrees from 12 universities I could never get into, and help them look at a problem in a new way. Once the problem is described, the designer is more likely to say, ‘Well, did you look at this? How about doing it this way?’ It's about not adhering to a set of restrictions that have defined how you think in business. Designers don’t follow that same book of rules.”

Kit Hinrichs, Partner of Pentagram