I had a high school art teacher, Mr. Temesy, whose highest praise during drawing exercises was to say that your drawing was “well observed.” I’ll admit that at the time I was mostly mystified by what exactly he was driving at with those cryptic words of encouragement. He would take us out on sketching expeditions and ask things like “what colour is this tree trunk?” Inevitably the answer would come back “brown”, much to his frustration. He would call us over to actually look at the tree, and sure enough, there would be a lot of colours there, but not much that anybody would reasonably consider brown. If you don’t believe me, go outside and look at a tree trunk. What he was trying to get us to do, of course, was to move beyond merely looking at things to actually seeing and understanding them. Seeing them in the sense of fully perceiving what was there, not just lazily relying on assumptions and faulty schemas.
Observation is important for any analytical profession, and most of us have spheres of knowledge in which our powers of observation are really finely tuned. We get good at understanding what we’re seeing by repetition, by seeing similar things over and over again. That familiarity makes it easier to spot outliers that might be important, because they stand out from what we’ve seen before or expect. Much of our perception of everyday life relies on our ability to fill in the the holes in what we “see” with approximations of what we expect, based on experience.
It’s interesting that it can often take a fairly large change in “things” to attract our attention, or to even be perceivable, yet we can recognize friends in a crowd at a glance, sometimes even just by the way they walk. To do this, there is some serious visual analysis going on, tracking very subtle cues, suggesting that we’re capable of “seeing” far more than we do on a day-to-day basis. It’s theorized that our perceptive abilities with people have evolved for understandable survival reasons — we need to be able to distinguish our friends from our enemies, especially when the latter might want to kill us. But if we can do this with the most complex and subtle of cues in other people, why not with things? I think the answer is that we can do it, we just don’t bother to in most cases.
It feels like there is a class of people, for want of a better word, Tastemakers, that do bother, and are able to perceive and evaluate objects visually much better than the rest of the population. Some of these Tastemakers are designers, of course, but lots aren’t. They seem to be able to discern small differences between objects and form judgements about what is visually pleasing and tasteful and what isn’t. In my experience, many people that have really excellent judgement about the aesthetics and design of “things” cannot necessarily articulate why one thing is better than another. Much of this kind of judgement is intuitive and subconscious — this is better than that, because it just is. It’s almost as if it’s innate. Perhaps it is in a way, maybe these folks can assess objects with the same ease as the rest of humanity can read faces. If so, it’s because they’re seeing and perceiving at a much deeper level.
The trick to emulating the Tastemakers is in the observing. Mr. Temesy knew that his students couldn’t draw what they hadn’t seen and visually understood, so he pushed us to go back and look again. It’s a crucial skill for designers, this ability to observe deeply — without it everything they do will be harder and less successful. The great news is that it’s an ability that can be improved with practice — the more you look, the more you see. The more things you’ve seen and visually understood and internalized, the better equipped you are to confidently make the admittedly subjective judgement about what is “good” and what is not. Do it enough, and you’ll know it when you see it.
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