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Should We Trust Intuition In The Design Process?

Writer's picture: Rania Said AbdallaRania Said Abdalla

Updated: Apr 9, 2021

Albert Einstein said, "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."


Through the Strategic Design and Management Master's Program at Parsons School of Design, my classmate and I in Design Innovation and Leadership class observed how intuition plays a role in our life and design process.


There is a clear boundary about when you can trust your intuitions and when you cannot. Intuition is based on recognizing and contemplating specific emotions, situations, ideas, theories, and impressions. This is how we as humans are different from animals. Both animals and humans have instincts. However, animals cannot translate data or recognize information. We recognize patterns and reality through data and information, and the world has to be irregular enough to pick up enough regularities. And this is how we can have enough exposure to those regularities to learn them. After that, we will be able to get feedback. With practicing, humans can develop intuition.


Moreover, the conclusion is that intuition is trainable. It is like the 10,000-hour rule. However, the 10,000-hour rule has to be practiced in the right ways! Confidence and accuracy--even though they are not highly correlated--are tied to intuition. We can be biased in terms of intuition, leading us to non-quality results or non-accurate results. Confidence that is built on facts and proper guidelines can lead to accuracy. Our job is to find the discrepancy between certain decisions and actions that lead human behavior. Moreover, this is related to cognitive bias and illusions--illusions of thought as Daniel Kahneman noted in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. We can catch recognizable situations based on repeated patterns related to being an expert on reading intuition. Intuition is developed and improved through experience. The more experience and perspective individuals cultivate over time, the more intuitive individuals can become.


References:

Boris Müller, “In Defence of Intuition,” Medium, January 6, 2017, https://borism.medium.com/in-defence-of-intuition-f924ab82f76b.


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