More of You and Less of Me: Better Design Through Humility

Your team could spend years crafting and adapting the most effective design process imaginable. However, no matter how tried and true your process may become, it will always fall short of your best work if it lacks one key element: humility. When designers build their process on a foundation of humility—elevating the needs, perspectives, and gifts of others above their own—we will finally produce the kind of work that truly makes us proud. But practicing humility can be hard to do in our fast-paced, results-driven, me-centered industries. In this talk, we'll begin by exploring how me-centered thinking can infiltrate our design process, concluding with a self-evaluation. We'll then continue to see how humility can transform the way we research, ideate, and design. Finally, we'll walk away with practical steps on how you and your team can introduce humble, human-centered decision making into each step of your design process.