Everyone Can Teach You Something About Design: Lessons From the Amazon

As we sit on the shore of the Amazon River, watching the sun go down, we reflect on the time we have spent in Brasil and the things we learned. We learned about culture, the kindness of the people, the toll that 36 straight hours of travel takes on your body, and the dolphins that inhabit the river. One of the most important lessons we learned was that everyone can teach you something about design, and the importance of humility as a designer.

One of the purposes of our trip to Amazonas was testing a machine that was being co-developed by Phillip Stevenson and a cooperative of farmers in the region. We spent many hours interacting with farmers, harvesting cassava, and testing the machine. By interacting directly with the farmers and testing the machine with them we saw an important design lesson: anyone can teach you something about design. These farmers were excited to share their ideas, and because of their knowledge of cassava, the design has the chance to improve.

We see three important points to learning from anyone:

1. Everyone is your Superior in some way

On one hike to a farm with a pastor, we learned that the Amazon has a particular vine that can work as dental floss. We learned how to make charcoal for cooking in stoves from a pineapple farmer and we learned how to crack open a Brasil nut from a man who is a cookie maker. 

Of course, we learned many other things over the few hours of interaction with these Brasilians, but we were struck by how creative, intelligent, and innovative they were with the resources they had available. Few, if any of them, approached the number of years of formal education that we’ve acquired, but here they were teaching us in almost every translated statement from Portuguese about various design elements related to context, process, tools, and performance. Everyone has something to teach us. Everyone is our superior in some way. 

As our team focused on the design of the cassava peeling machine directly we worked to draw out those skills, knowledge, or experience from others that we simply do not possess. For example, over many years of planting, harvesting, and peeling cassava roots, these locals have seen tens of thousands of cassava roots. Compare that to the hundred that we’ve seen.

2. Always seek feedback

As you progress further into a project, it is very easy to stop seeking feedback. We get to a point in the project where we have a path forward and we just want to see that path to completion, even if it isn’t the best path. This can often happen when we have a higher fidelity prototype that functions fairly well. It is very easy to move forward with the design you have and no longer seek feedback - after all, it passes most of the tests. Throughout the design process, we need to continue to seek feedback and refine the design. This can be done by interacting with many different stakeholders and soliciting feedback. As you solicit feedback you might have to ask a few times to get to a person’s true feelings. Quite often when soliciting feedback we get general statements such as, “it’s good.” At this point, try asking more specific questions such as “what would you improve?” or “what is the worst thing about this design?”

In Brasil our team saw the value of asking the same questions of many people. Repeating the same question eventually caused them to realize we were serious and not simply fishing for a compliment. We noticed a little more effort on their part and as a result we got a range of feedback that could help improve the design. Sometimes the results were still general but as we continued to look for more feedback there were instances of valuable insight. As you seek feedback, make sure you have a way to record it. Audio or video are great so you can go back and catch every detail.

3. Verify and Validate the Feedback

As you collect more feedback you will most likely may get one answer from one person and get a contradicting answer from another person. At this point, you need a mechanism to determine what feedback (if any of them) is correct. Some items may be a matter of opinion, in which case you can look at the distribution of results to see which opinions are most popular. Other items will need a correct answer. You may need to turn to a subject matter expert, consult previous research on the subject, or conduct new experiments. While everyone can teach you something about design, it is important to verify and validate what they teach you.

Why validate? Because we’re all human after all and subject to a large host of cognitive biases. For example, there are significant consequences of groupthink and consensus bias, where we tend to agree too readily with the group because of social pressure or we think others will agree with us, respectively.  Likewise, inaccurate data can propagate throughout a population from person to person and from generation to generation due to availability biases or appeal to tradition. Therefore, in some cases, feedback may be what someone else thinks you want to hear instead of what you really need to hear. Although some forms of feedback might make you feel good, it won’t necessarily advance the state of your design, which is ultimately why you requested feedback in the first place. Ask, but then don’t forget to verify and validate.

Conclusion

Leaving Brasil instilled a new sense of humility in our design practice. We relearned to not think that we know more than anyone. We will each know different things, not necessarily more or less than anybody else. Seek to learn from everyone, and then verify and validate what they teach you to improve your designs.