A mindful way of living: The designer way

No, this is not about being able to bend it like Beckham and being able to do a headstand.

I’m not a designer. I write. But at Slangbusters, we have designers- those who design strategies, interfaces, graphics, concepts, everything. I usually try to take inspiration from their work, but mostly, their processes. And one insight I found common in all my colleagues was mindful living.

You see, it is a pre-established fact that in order to create, consumption is a requisite. And this is not a dig against the overrated aspect of originality, it has proof. To any designer who claims that they are cent percent original, ask them if they practice creating a mood board before starting work on a project.

I noticed good designers don’t wait for a project to make a mood board to get inspiration. They see the world as a mood board. Everything is fodder and worth looking at the details of.

For a layperson, good design is invisible. But for a designer, they can’t help but notice good and bad design both. They have tattooed the fact in their brains that everything is intentional, designed by someone and has had thought and effort put into its creation. And once you read this, you realize that from the device you are reading this to the chair you are sitting on, the surface you are standing on, the cup of tea you’re holding- everything is intentionally designed in a way to make menial tasks like sipping tea to your daily commute easier with simple and sensible design.

My eureka moment for this realization was when our interface designer would also notice how I designed sentences. Of course, he knew about what language works better while designing the user experience- but who knew that would be easily applicable to long-form texts like articles? And this knowledge doesn’t come only from guides like Google’s material design. It comes from taking mental notes when you experience things daily.

We live in a society where creators and consumers co-exist. When the creators create, they keep the user in mind and most of these user habits insight comes from being a user themselves.

For writers, this stands absolutely 100% true. I took inspiration from the process of a designer to write this piece. I could look out the window and get inspiration for a blog. But for other specializations, it seems as if the scope of such consumption limits to, well, other good design of that specialization. But that is a false assumption amateurs usually make and end up creating photocopies of good work, with minor tweaks that might save them from plagiarization accusations.

Good designers take inspiration from basically everywhere. The art of constantly being aware of your surroundings is mindfulness. Once you get the hang of it, your subconscious will do it for you and store it in for later use.

This can usually be seen in fields like product designing, where they take constant inspiration from nature- where everything is perfectly designed and is in the true sense, timeless- since it has stood the test of time for gazillion years since the inception of our planet itself. Grass is green and wood is brown like it has always been. Unaffected by trends.

They call it biomimetics. They even have a definition for it: "science that studies nature's models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems"

You will find the best inspiration where you least expect it. So better have your senses inviting to never miss a moment of inspiration. Otherwise, the story would be, one fine noon in 1687, an apple fell and Newton had a healthy evening snack.

Do you want mindful designers to work on your brand? Contact us now for a quick chat about the possibilities of collaboration.

— by Manas Daxini, Content Strategist, Slangbusters Studio