Steve Portigal posted his excellent talk from a CHIFOO conference, “Skill Building for Design Innovators“. His summary:
How can you broaden your sphere of influence within the field of human-computer interaction? You can start by building your muscles! Steve will take a look at some fundamental skills that underlie the creation and launch of innovative goods and services. He will discuss the personal skills that he considers to be “the muscles of innovators” and the ways you can build these important muscles, including noticing, understanding cultural context, maintaining exposure to pop culture, synthesizing, drawing, wordsmithing, listening, and prototyping. Along the way, he will demonstrate how improving these powerful skills will equip you to lead positive change. http://www.portigal.com/blog/skill-building-for-design-innovators-from-chifoo/
Working out is a great analogy for design skill-building. “Hitting the gym” (can you say that phrase and not sound like a douche?) is necessary to keep your body and mind fit, alert, and ready to handle the challenges of any given day. Also, from what little I know about weight-lifting, working out different muscles in a systematic & balanced way yields the best results, just like a designer benefits most by training & growing in a multifaceted way. Like a good trainer, Steve tells us to hit the gym with his recommended training regiments: taking a camera with you on stimulating walks; collecting items that only make sense in other cultures; wading in the shallows of pop culture; and even tweeting to help with wordsmithing (crafting copy and short labels).
There are three skills that I feel are part of a well-equipped designer toolkit, and could have been included in the talk. The first is dialoguing, or facilitating. A good designer finds a way to encourage an exchange of ideas on level ground, without egos involved. Sometimes sharing opinions becomes personal, but a good designer should be able to brainstorm, let ideas compete, then devise a solution without weakening bonds of professional trust and without killing a team’s enthusiasm. Imagining is another important skill, which is important to devise solutions and envision paths to completing them. This muscle can be exercised by day dreaming or doodling or sketching. The last important skill is persuading. A designer is a salesman of ideas; practice runs before presentations or doing talks in front of peers are good ways to exercise our skill of selling.