Right near the beginning of the Yoga Sutra, there’s this verse that basically says that continual practice without attachment to the results leads to peace of mind. (I’m paraphrasing heavily, of course.) Patanjali’s talking about spiritual practice and meditation, but lately I’ve been thinking about how well this idea also applies to work and the process of design.

I’ll try to explain what I mean by looking at this statement in three parts.

continual practice
Personally, I find it liberating to think of the process of designing as practice; and not only practice, but continual practice, a process that never ends. Designing is never done, you’re never actually there; at some point you stop and move on to the next problem, but there are very few (if any) design problems that are ever really truly solved. Designing is a lifelong (or at least careerlong) process of practicing and getting better, using the lessons from one problem to solve the next, and responding to the continually-changing demands of environment, tools, and user expectations.

without attachment to the results
At least where I work currently, design is very collaborative. Not keeping an attachment to your results, to the specific details of “your” design, is an important trait for any designer who wants to function well in these critiques and brainstorm sessions. Even better, if everyone continually practices design but remains unattached to their particular results, the best ideas will be able rise to the top through discussion and collaboration. This can only happen if no one is so strongly attached to an idea that they’re unwilling to look at it from other points of view.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t strongly advocate for ideas that you think are the best. However, that advocacy has to be backed up with a good rationale, which you can use to persuade others. Again, that goes back to the idea of continual practice, which (ideally) leads to good designs backed up by research and good rationale.

leads to peace of mind
Let me tell a story. For the past ~5 months, I’ve been in an Information Architect rotation, as part of this entry-level training program. During that ~5 months, I think that one thing out of everything that I’ve designed has actually been implemented. I could let this bother me, and I won’t lie, sometimes it does. I like to joke that if you want a project killed, just put me on it; it’s sure to get canceled soon after. But that’s life, at least in a large corporation with shifting priorities and lots of stakeholders, and especially when you’re a more junior type of person.

Nonetheless, I’m a basically optimistic (though impatient) person, and thinking of design in the ways I described above helps me feel better about the situation. If designing is a continual practice, then nothing that I’ve done has really been wasted, because every step leads into something else, and the act of designing itself gains some kind of value. And trying to remain unattached to my specific ideas keeps me from becoming discouraged or resentful. Hence, the two together lead to peace of mind.

I definitely don’t manage to attain this attitude all or even most of the time. But I think that, as an aspiring designer, it’s an excellent attitude to strive for. It’s also an interesting variation on a very old idea. Who knew that ancient spiritual insights could have practical relevance in the modern world?