To thrive in our dynamic century, you need to learn ‘how to learn’

I’m pretty convinced that design can play a part in innovation in just about any sector. And as I reflected on these examples while I wrote Creative Acts for Curious People, I realized that all these disparate solutions have something else in common, too.

In every class, in every project, and with just every assignment we teach, I’ve seen people benefit from a secondary set of outcomes: new skills in fostering trust and collaboration, growing self-awareness, genuine empathy, deeper humility, and even resilience in the face of failures. Perhaps the most important of these side benefits of practicing design is the ability to learn in real time, in the real world. The excerpt below is one effort to show how closely linked design and learning really are—and why that’s so important right now.

The uncertain times we are in call on us to respond to new problems just about every day. For the foreseeable future the world will keep challenging us in ways that most people never expected or trained for. And it’s not just at home or work, it’s in every facet of life: education, technology, climate, politics, community, and more.

What do we do with all this ambiguity and complexity? We absolutely must get better and faster at learning how to solve new kinds of challenges, collectively and as individuals. I think design will play an important role in helping us do that. As I write below, we all need to build our capacity to learn in new ways. The payoff is not just those new solutions, it’s the confidence that comes from knowing you can tackle a future problem you haven’t seen before.

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How often have you asked a kid in your life, “What did you learn in school today?”

It’s a natural question we’ve all uttered hundreds of times, perhaps delighting but more likely aggravating our nieces, nephews, and neighborhood kids, or our own children. When we ask what someone has learned, we’re usually referring to the knowledge—or stuff—they’re collecting. Stuff is content and facts or procedures to do something concrete like make tenses agree or handle an improper fraction. Very important, although just one part of the picture. Next time you start to ask the “what” question, instead, try out “How did you learn in school today?” Thinking about the how starts to bring us into the world where we also hold up and value the process of learning.

Learning is the critical skill for our always-in-flux modern era. It’s what helps you face unexpected, unpredictable challenges. But a habit of focusing on the what reveals how frequently we ignore learning itself as a specific skill to acquire. What gets learned is very different from how we learn something…and the next thing, and the next thing, and the thing after that. If the how is less considered, it holds us back from flexing our full abilities as learners.

The good news is that there are approaches you can draw on to help round out how you think about learning. In addition to more how-oriented approaches—like Carol Dweck’s growth mindset and Linda Darling-Hammond’s work on all types of inquiry-based learning—design offers everyone another way to learn. At its most essential level, design is a process of learning in action. The powerful way that design helps people to be learners may even account for the accelerating demand for people to become familiar with design in business, education, and all kinds of unexpected fields like law, science, and government.

Academics are getting a handle on how people learn, but for most of us, it’s still a mystery. We just know kids do it naturally. A toddler who knocks over a bowl of cereal is performing a physics experiment to investigate gravity. And when she does it again, she’s performing a complex psychological experiment to test her caretaker’s reaction. And again, to examine the sociology of the family unit in response to repeated stressful stimuli. And again, possibly just for fun or to show everyone who’s actually in charge.

Kids are super learners; they notice and seize opportunities for learning. They experiment to generate new data, then interpret that data and repeat their experiments to build on the initial basis of what they’ve learned. They perform these activities in a complex social environment rather than a sterile abstraction of one, and they engage in learning on a “need to know” or “want to know” basis. It is mind blowing.

Once learning becomes more formal, results vary. We’ve all been in a class that felt too fast or too slow, too big or too small, too theoretical or too applied, even if that same class was working well for the person in the next seat. From personal experience you know that one size or shape doesn’t fit all. But even if you know what doesn’t work for you, do you know your own shape of learning? Can you describe it? The contours, the irregularities, and the volume, not just the outline? If not, can you discover what learning looks like to you?

The world around us is currently imperfect and we can be resourceful and inventive in a way that improves our own experience and that of others. Adopting this mindset gives you the agency to build up your own capacity to meet the demands of the future. And as the world continues to change around you, you’ll gain strength not just from what you have learned, but also from how you are learning. 

Put more urgently: Right now, the world needs you to adopt this mindset and help us all get better at learning how to learn. A common refrain in the early twenty-first century is the observation of how fast the world is changing, how many new technologies and social forces are shaping our lives, and how hard it is to keep up. By definition the future is always uncertain, and it’s ever easier to feel a heightened sense of unease and confusion about what your hometown, your country, or our planet will look like in the next few years, months, or even weeks. The methods of design are powerful tools for learning more when the answer is unclear. 

In an era like this one, we all need the ability to adapt, to be resilient, and to be creative and generative even when we are uncertain. This is a moment when seeing ourselves as designers can help us the most. It’s not enough to know how things have worked in the past; we must be open to creating a dynamic future. 

Design itself has evolved over the past century to arrive in a new form at this moment, hopefully just in time. Most people think design is just about the creation of physical objects; it’s also much more. The foundational tools of design are now widely applied to making new experiences, systems, and even ideas. It’s a broad “just get in there and solve problems” kind of field, combining a range of tools for learning to confront new challenges without preexisting solutions. 

For example, several years ago a former d.school student, Alex Lofton, hatched an idea for how to make it easier for young people to afford to buy a house. This was informed in part by the financial constraints that he and many of his peers were experiencing in their late twenties and early thirties. The initial concept was an online platform where friends and family could pool many small contributions and support the prospective home buyer in exchange for a little piece of ownership of the home—sort of a Kickstarter model for property purchases. 

As Alex and his team built rough prototypes and shared the idea with other people, they uncovered many different challenges to their original concept, and they began to converge on a more targeted need and group. They became determined to find a way to make it more affordable for educators to buy a house in expensive markets where they have a hard time living on a teacher’s salary in or even near the same (expensive) community where their school is located. The solution became more specific and robust, and the concept more mission-driven. In 2015 Alex and team founded Landed, a company that directly helps essential professionals like educators and health care workers afford a down payment through a shared equity arrangement and provides services to help them navigate the daunting home-buying process. 

Or take the story of Gina Jiang, another d.school alum who is a doctor based in Taiwan. Despite the advantage of working in a health care system that offers both affordable and high-quality care, Gina works to address the problem that doctors do not have enough time to spend listening to individual patients in Taiwan’s busy hospitals. She set up a space for creativity and collaboration—the very first local patient experience and innovation center—which “makes time” for patient care issues that might otherwise be overlooked.

Opening a physical and organizational space revealed unexpected opportunities, including an idea from one wound-care nurse with a long-term patient who, it turned out, had been making custom ostomy bags for other patients. These bags (used by people who have had an often lifesaving surgery that changes how their body eliminates waste), were comfortable, could withstand Taiwan’s heat and humidity, and helped prevent ostomy hernias. But this patient had never before shared her ideas and approach. Gina and her team worked closely with the nurse, patient, and manufacturers to develop a new version that could be produced on a much larger scale and also met the goal of enhancing the dignity of patients who used them. Critical to Gina’s process was creating journey maps to carefully document the highs and lows of someone’s day and deliberately instilling fun and humor in the dynamic of the creative team while working on a challenging project.

You may not yet have heard of these two exceptionally creative, dedicated people, but they are using their creativity and design skills to make meaningful work happen in fields as disparate as real estate and health care. They exemplify the core design behaviors of inventiveness and resourcefulness, as well as empathy, experimentation, and being mindful of how their process affects their outcomes. In both Gina and Alex’s cases, they set out on their design journey without knowing all the answers or even all the right questions. And this is the same behavior that has been described as a key to the success of some of design’s biggest luminaries, like Charles Eames.

Eames; his wife, Ray; and many of the other designers at the Eameses’ studio were often beginners on the topics they tackled (as in their long-term relationship with IBM during the early days of computing). However, they produced exceptional work in part because they were insatiably curious and incredible at learning about new things. They had a type of confidence that comes from knowing you can tackle a problem you haven’t seen before.

Design is now being used to tackle many types of problems that no one has seen before, because the fundamentals of design help you learn quickly. The parallels between design and learning are starting to be investigated formally, but you don’t need to wait for academic confirmation to know that this feels right. As you continue to develop your practice, you’ll find yourself increasingly adept at taking on challenges of all kinds and sizes. You too can become known for being equipped and willing to dive into uncertain challenges whenever they come along.

Richard Saul Wurman, an architect, graphic designer, and prolific creator of ways to bring people together with new ideas, described Charles Eames in the following way, hinting at the expansion of design’s relevance to all of us in a fast-changing world with many unknowns: “You sell your expertise, you have a limited repertoire. You sell your ignorance, it’s an unlimited repertoire. [Eames] was selling his ignorance and his desire to learn about a subject. The journey from not knowing to knowing was his work.”

The journey from not knowing to knowing is every design project in a nutshell. And it can be your story every time you face a problem without already knowing the answer. Through design, you may even discover that no one has yet asked the right question. What is discovery? It’s yet another word for learning.

Developing your design abilities is a new way to think about learning, and this approach can grow with you for the rest of your life. At this moment in history, it’s vital: so many people, communities, and organizations need better, more human, more ingenious approaches to address the needs that face us and our rapidly changing contexts. You may not always know exactly what to do, but you’ll know how to figure it out. That’s how design can help, even on the occasions when your world turns upside down.

Learning how to learn is the fundamental ability you need to thrive in our dynamic century. It’s at the heart of every assignment in this book: philosophies and ways to approach the world with an inquisitive, open mind; to frame opportunities to change things; to make your ideas tangible and testable in order to learn what’s possible. 

The philosopher Eric Hoffer said, “In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”

Let’s be learners. Let’s be designers. Let’s inherit the future and do everything we can to shape it for the better.

Reprinted with permission from Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways by Sarah Stein Greenberg and the Stanford d.school, copyright © 2021. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House.