Design needs to look elsewhere

We'd benefit from spending less time looking at each other's work.

Read more. Watch more films. Study architecture, photography, literature. Pay attention to what's happening outside the creative industry. Talk to people who have nothing to do with design.

More importantly, spend time understanding the businesses and people we're designing for. Their habits, contradictions, ambitions, frustrations.

And question the references we bring into projects. Are they helping us understand the problem, or are we just borrowing a solution we happen to like?

None of this means ignoring what other designers are doing. There's plenty of good work worth studying, but it shouldn't become the standard against which everything else is measured.

We talk a lot about differentiation. Perhaps we should take our own advice and start by thinking a little differently.