A mindfulness toolkit for designers to enhance insight

Abstract

Overview
This project describes the development and evaluation of a mindfulness course for enabling design practitioners to develop enhanced creative insight possible, both in a moment of practice during daily design work and in the long-term development of character. The course is centred around a novel mindfulness exercise: ‘closure practice’. It aims to explicitly integrate two opposing processes of cognition that are central to the mechanism of insight: “scaling down” and “scaling up”, which are isolated in traditional meditation and contemplation practices, respectively (Vervaeke and Ferraro, 2016).

Design outcome
The course to teach designers this exercise was embodied as an online podcast, The mindful designer. It first introduces the relevance of mindfulness for designers and then moves to separate exercises that tackle several aspects of closure practice. The goal of the podcast is to teach the listener to perform closure practice in absence of the podcast with the use of an auxiliary bracelet, similar to the traditional use of the rosary, tasbih, and mala.

Key findings
The podcast was evaluated with a mixed-methods approach with respect to the design goals. Participants (n = 3) filled in online questionnaires. They agreed that mindfulness is useful during creative problem solving, to a greater degree post-study, than they did pre-study. Feedback suggested that ideas and insights occurred as an effect of the exercises, although the guidance of the narrations was problematic at times should be improved to suit design projects better. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) analysis on the response texts also indicated that the practice had cognitive effects in line with the design intent.

Recommendation
Feedback throughout the project strongly suggested that experienced mindfulness practitioners found utility in closure practice, but that less experienced or naive practitioners did not, because they lacked the skills necessary to derive the benefits from the practice. I recommend the development of a course to teach design students or professionals the basic skills of mindfulness spanning several months and eventually the performance of closure practice, which might be recognised as more valuable by then. Broader implications were also discussed.

Vervaeke, J., and Ferraro, L. (2016). Reformulating the mindfulness construct: The cognitive processes at work in mindfulness, hypnosis, and mystical states. In Hypnosis and meditation: Towards an integrative science of conscious planes (1st ed., pp. 241–268). Oxford University Press. ISBN: 978-0-19-875910-2