Personality Characteristics of Great Designers

The MBTI gives some insight into typical programmer personalities, but it isn't the final word. One important group of software development skills is software design skills. Many programmers aspire to be great designers. What are the characteristics of great designers? One study^[11] of great designers in general (not just software developers) found that the most creative human problem solvers seem to move easily between the S/N, T/F, and P/J ends of the continuum. They move back and forth between holistic and sequential, intuition and logic, theory and specific details. They are able to look at problems from many different points of view. Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein are examples of such great designers (although I don't believe they ever took the MBTI).

Great designers have a large set of standard patterns that they apply to each new problem. If the problem fits an existing pattern, the great designer can easily solve it using a familiar technique.

Great designers have mastery of the tools they use.

Great designers aren't afraid of complexity, and some of the best are drawn to it. But their goal is to make the seemingly complex simple. As Einstein said, everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. The French writer and aircraft designer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry made much the same point when he said, "You know you have achieved perfection in design not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away."

Great designers seek out criticism of their work. The feedback loop that criticism supports allows them to try and discard many possible solutions.

Great designers usually have experience on failed projects and have made a point of learning from their failures. They try out and discard more alternatives. They are often wrong, but they discover and correct their mistakes quickly. They have the tenacity to continue trying alternatives even after others have given up.

They are not afraid of using brute force to solve a problem. Thomas Edison worked on the problem of designing a filament for an electric light bulb for nearly two years, and he tried thousands of materials. An assistant once asked him how he could keep trying after failing so many times. Edison didn't understand the question. In his mind, he hadn't failed at all. He is supposed to have replied, "What failure? I know thousands of things that do not work."

Great designers must be creative to generate numerous candidate design solutions. A great deal of research has been done on creativity, and there are some common themes. Creative people are curious, and their curiosity covers a wide range of interests. They have high energy. They are self-confident and independent enough to explore ideas that other people think are foolish. They value their own judgment. They are intellectually honest, which helps them differentiate what they really think from what the conventional wisdom says they should think.

Great designers have a restless desire to create to make things. That desire might be to create a building, an electronic circuit, or a computer program. They have a bias toward action. Great designers aren't satisfied merely to learn facts; they feel compelled to apply what they have learned to real-world situations. To the great designer, not applying knowledge is tantamount to not having obtained the knowledge in the first place.

Programmers live for the "aha" insights that produce breakthrough design solutions. I think this is one of the reasons software developers' affinity for Monty Python makes more sense than it might at first appear. Monty Python flouts social conventions using unorthodox juxtapositions of elements of time and culture. The same independent-minded, out-of-the-box thinking that gives rise to Monty Python's scripts can also give rise to the innovative technical design solutions that programmers strive for.

Some of these characteristics match the programmer stereotype, and some do not. People outside software development might think of computer programming as dry and uncreative. People inside software development know that some of the most exciting projects of our times could not be accomplished without extreme software creativity. Movie animation, space exploration, computer games, medical technology it's hard to find a leading-edge area that doesn't depend on software developers' creativity.

Software developers know that, stereotypes aside, computer programming gives them a medium in which they can create something out of nothing. That provides them with the same satisfaction that others obtain from sculpting, painting, writing, or other activities that are more obviously creative. "Mind-numbingly boring?" I think not.