设计师怎么不断成长？

在LifeClever上看到这则问答，我想对我的博客读者有些用，现转载如下：

How Do You Keep Growing as a Designer?

Samantha asks:

I’m just finishing up 4 years at an ad agency and moving to a new a location and job. I am wondering, how do you stay up on trends? I feel like sometimes I’m so caught up in the day-to-day getting-it-done that I forget to look around. Any tips or sources that would be helpful?

First, the short answer

To keep up on what’s cool, check out these three resources:

1. Alltop: Design
   Alltop’s design secetion aggregates posts from top design and trends blogs such as Cool Hunting and Design Observer. This is where to get your daily dose of cool.

2. AIGA events
   The AIGA holds a million events throughout the year. These include portfolio reviews, lectures, and conferences. Many of these events include free wine, cheese, and lots of black-rimmed glasses.

3. Flavorpill
   For art, fashion, music, and film events, Flavorpill’s got the latest. For now, the site only covers New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, Chicago, and Miami.

Now, the long answer

Staying trendy is easy. The tougher question is: How do you keep growing as a designer?

This is much harder to do.

Why?

Because we like efficiency. Efficiency means less stress and less risk. It means optimizing what you already know to reduce the energy it takes to think and act.

It’s why old folks love the groundbreaking music of yesterday, and hate the inferior music of today. It’s why we go through the same routines every morning as we get ready for work. If we had to think about how to tie our shoes everyday, we’d go crazy. Efficiency just makes life easier.

But it makes learning harder.

New language, ideas, and knowledge add new “biocost” to our lives. They are inherently inefficient, because they require more energy to acquire. So we stick to our old habits.

But here’s the danger. Efficiency depends on your environment staying the same. If it changes dramatically, you’re screwed. You’ve become so efficient for one specific context, that you can’t adapt to a changing paradigm. Examples: Blockbuster, CompUSA, New Kids on the Block.

So what’s a designer to do? I don’t pretend to have one simple solution. But here are some ideas:

1. Seek a variety of friends
   Don’t just stick to the same group of people you know and love. Instead, make friends from a variety of disciplines. Doctors, lawyers, painters, yoga gurus, jugglers. The more different, the better. This exposes you to tons of new ideas, enabling you to find new connections to your own discipline.

2. Move
   Are you still in your hometown living exactly the same way since you were born? Unstuck yourself, and move somewhere else. Even if it’s just for awile.

3. Travel
   If you can’t move, visit a far far away place. (You might like it so much, you won’t come back.)

4. Read
   More than just coffee-table design books. Try the fantastically accessible series, Very Short Introductions.

5. Go back to school
   And get a degree in a different field than your first one.

6. Teach a class
   It’s the best way to push your knowledge of a subject to a new level. It also exposes you to new and fresh ideas from your students. Learning is both ways.

7. Research a favorite topic
   Everyone should have something they’re passionate about and want to learn more about. Really smart businesses make sure everyone in the company has a research topic. Even cashiers can provide insights about customers. It’s a way for organizations to learn and for everyone to contribute at another level.

8. Make sure your job involves learning
   Part of your compensation is what your job teaches you, and how it prepares you for the next job. Good managers understand this instinctively and mentor. Well run companies have formal cross-training and job-rotation programs, so employees learn other parts of the business. Yahoo!, for example, holds regularly “Hack Days” where participants show off their work and learn from one another.

For more on efficiency, language, biocost, variety, learning, and growth, check out the wonderfully succinct and insightful, Notes on the Role of Leadership and Language in Regenerating Organizations. It’s written by Hugh Dubberly, Peter Esmonde, Michael C Geoghegan, and Paul Pangaro, produced for Sun Microsystems.

Special thanks to Hugh Dubberly for his advice and feedback on this post

How do you continue to grow as a designer? Add your advice and tips below.