In his book Designing Design, Kenya Hara, the art director of Muji, wrote “Talking about design is another way of designing.” Indeed I found this true. In designers’ daily work, talking about design philosophies, communicating design concepts and educating others about design, are sometimes more challenging than designing itself. This is why I decided to bring back my long gone hobby and started blogging again.

Aside from some obvious benefits like sharing ideas, marketing yourselves and  improving writing skills, blogging has other benefits not just to designers, but to everybody. So why should we blog?

Blogging helps us synthesis life and learn from the past.

First and foremost, people have the tendency to forget, and blogging is a way to keep track of life. Life is a learning experience, we grow by learning from books, from other people, but most importantly, from our past. Writing forces us to synthesis our life and learn from it. Someone once said “Learning from the past means recognizing mistakes, resolving them to the best of your ability and consciously deciding not to repeat them.” This is not just true for life in general, it is also the core idea of iterative design process. That’s why one of my colleagues co-founded a conference, the FailCon, just for people to share their failure. But of course life is not just full of failures, so I will share in this blog other interesting stuff in my life as well.

Blogging is the motivation of side projects and many other ideas.

If just to learn from the past, a private diary is enough to achieve the goal. But why making it public? Well, the second benefit of blogging, is the motivation. Just like posting photos to Facebook (or bragging) can be the motivation of a social gathering or a trip, writing a blog can also be the motivation of reading a book, generating fun ideas, or even moving forward with some of them. Side projects are extremely important for designers to keep the creative mind sharp, and updating a blog might be a good reason to step aside from daily work and do something different. Let alone the valuable feedback you might get from the random audiences on the internet. I always hear people say “I had an idea just like that!” But like my adviser always says “It’s only real when it’s out there.” Well, a blog is a start of making things real.

Blogging is … just fun.

Third… I don’t even know why there needs to be a third point to make anything convincing (maybe it’s a habit from syllogism?) I guess for me, the third benefit of blogging, is that writing is just fun and fulfilling. But if you find writing extremely painful, then maybe try something else, like … tweeting?

Well, there we go. First blog. Check.

San Francisco | 2012. 09. 20