Design Literacy

This human element of design literacy will become as important as verbal literacy, not only in understanding culture and aesthetics but also in forming and expressing new ideas. It’s a new type of intelligence and design that will separate those who thrive from those who fade into the noise.

Design as curiosity

Design as curation

Startups are the ideal canvas for applying design literacy. They require continuous iteration, not static perfection, in order to succeed. They are not timeless; they exist and succeed in their moment alone. They cannot rely on distribution or incumbency, only original thinking, relentless iteration and, for those persistent enough, transformative ... See more

These founders recognize that company design goes beyond playbooks, case studies, or podcasts. Consider how modern startups approach product development: A technically proficient team might build perfect features, but design-literate founders create experiences that make users feel something when using the product. Notion succeeded not through tech... See more

Ask someone to define design, and they’ll likely describe what designers make—architects draft buildings, graphic designers create logos, industrial designers shape products, and software designers make apps. This is how we typically understand design, by its outputs. The weight of these definitions grows heavier over time. The older the craft, the... See more

The school wasn’t teaching design as ornamentation or styling. Instead, it was an intense course in principled thinking and creating connections between fields of art and making. It forced you to depart from your comfort zone and expertise as an artist and then return to apply it with new knowledge. I recall working with materials like wood (not my... See more

“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” – Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility 1935

But at the time, I questioned this approach. Why study semiotics when I could be building a portfolio site? Why pull all-nighters just to endure brutal critiques—tossing the work away and starting over? But the process—thinking, making, critique—proved transformative. The school wasn’t teaching design as ornamentation or styling. Instead, it was an... See more