The Characteristics of Excellent Designers - Findings from an Interview Study with Swedish Innovators

Paper in proceeding, 2015

Some designers are more successful than others. They have the ability to repeatedly generate new and innovative solutions to challenging problems. In this paper, we refer to designers who possess this level of skill as “excellent designers”. It would seem interesting to identify the characteristics of such individuals in order to better understand why they succeed while ordinary designer do not. However, there have been few published studies of excellent designers, and these studies have focused on one or a few individuals. In this paper, we account for a study of a larger group (15) of excellent designers. The aims were first to identify their particular set of knowledge, experience, working practices and personal characteristics and then to use the findings to generate proposals for how employers and educator can nurture excellent designers.