Inquisitiveness + perseverance: the intersection of mathematics and design
This week I started at Made Tech and this opened up conversations about how I got into design. This got me thinking about how two potential career directions have now tied together.
I’ve always loved mathematics. When I was at school I found it fun to complete mathematics exam workbooks in an evening, even when there was no exam coming up.
When the time came to decide on a career direction, I was split – I loved mathematics, but I also loved art and design. I eventually decided to pursue design, and at that point I thought mathematics was left to the wayside. It niggled away at me that I mostly had to drop that side of my mind and the majority of my time was spent creative thinking. Design does use some basic mathematical theories, such as the golden ratio, and is used to create grids and typographic scales, but something was missing in the design process.
This was early in my career when I was working as a graphic designer. I started out designing physical items but within a year the digital world was growing rapidly and I was almost solely working in that space. Everyone was trying to apply the same principles to the digital space as to physical items and it just wasn’t cutting it. The medium was different – it had more complexity, more options, people interacted in different ways and technology was advancing quickly. Design needed to keep up.
And then the user experience phenomenon hit big time… This revolutionised how I thought about design. It felt like a tidal shift happened and a light shone on how limited the design process had been. We’d always thought about where the piece of design was going to be used and who the audience was, but it lacked depth and real understanding.
But with the user-centred design process, we dig into detail about users, how they use the product and why they use it. Not only does this make the product and services better suited for their purpose but it makes the design process so much more interesting and fulfilling.
Suddenly, a whole host of skills I’d learned for mathematics were brought to the forefront in the design process. The analytical side of my brain was needed again!
These are just some of similarities I see between mathematics and design:
Both require an inquisitive nature. A desire to dig into something, to ask questions, to understand what you’re trying to achieve and to uncover how it works.
Both require a mindset of not being worried about going wrong or needing to start again. It’s important in both to keep trying different options until you find a solution.
Both need you to show your workings out. I remember at school repeatedly being told “you get most of your marks for your working out, not the answer”.
Both need the ability to hold information in your mind and play through different options in order to figure out solutions.
Many techniques that mathematics taught me are now used in my job every day. It might not be mathematics as you’d typically think about it, but the challenge of figuring something out and the process you go through has huge similarities. This just goes to show that things you do at school and cannot see a real life use case for (algebra springs to mind) can give you strong groundings later down the line. I know I’ll be forever grateful for my evenings spent solving unnecessary equations.