Why Critical Thinking is Important as a Designer?

The primary purpose of critical thinking is to achieve objective evaluation & analysis of issues, ideas, or multiple situations to build a clear, unbiased understanding about it throughout reaching the optimal solution.

It is one type of self-directed, self-monitored, self-directed, self-corrective way of thinking to improve how we share and communicate ideas & solve the issues.

Understanding and Interpreting Your Experiences

• As a website designer, you most likely have the knowledge & the skills to get started, your actual growth, however, can only happen when you are capable of analyzing the experiences you are having on the job. 

• A critical analysis is important towards understanding and interpreting your own professional experiences so that you can learn from them to become a better designer in the future.

Problem Detection

• As a designer, you have to detect a logical problem in any design, even before it gets the chance to become a real problem and that's where critical thinking is going to be the key which lets you think about different aspects & criticize the design from other points of view as well.

Connecting Theory to Practice with Critical Thinking

• By lack of theoretical knowledge guiding a practice, implementation would take a lot longer where you have o face the issues of trial and error at each step. 

• You can improve your ability as a good web designer by using critical thinking to connect gaps between theoretical education & practical experience of website designing.

How Do You Learn to Think Critically?

• As of till now, we already know that both theory & practical are important aspects of learning. 

• The practice is important because it doesn't matter how well you understand the theory behind a grid if you've never built one. However, you will get the context from theory for why those grids are important and understanding the theory behind them helps you know why you're using a grid, which type of grid to choose & so on. 

1. The practice is learning from your own experience
2. The theory is learning from the experience of others

Critical thinking helps to connect the both by looking at actual practice and observe how well it works with the theory and enables you to take theoretical knowledge & thinks how you could apply it for practice to your work or the work of others.

• The process is a simple one.

It starts by observing. Don’t just look at someone’s work. Learn to see it. Observe not only the whole, but the individual parts and think about what each part is doing, is trying to do, and how it contributes to the whole.

1. Observe — Give the work more than a glance. Look at the whole. 
2. Question — Keep asking yourself questions based on your observations. Why does the design work? Why doesn’t it work? What are the different parts doing? Are they contributing to the whole? Are they detracting from it?
3. Answer — Think about the answers to all the questions you’re raising. Being right isn’t necessary. What are important are you thinking about the answers?

Critical thinking is a handy method to address any situation before jumping directly to the analysis phase to evaluate or find a solution for it. This type of thinking is commonly used in different fields of science and art to build a clear objective perception of different situations that face designers, engineers, and researchers.