I Don’t Believe Designers Are Born
I think design is something you train yourself to see.
Field Note — August 2026
Framework
I Don’t Believe Designers Are Born
I think design is something you train yourself to see.
This is the first of three Field Notes I’ve wanted to write about design.
Not really about how to design.
More about my own pursuit of understanding what design actually is, where ideas come from, and why I’m still not convinced by something I’ve heard throughout my working life:
Either you’ve got it, or you haven’t.
Maybe some people do begin with a natural sensitivity to colour, proportion, composition or space.
I see some of that in my daughter.
But I also see something else.
She’s been exposed to it.
I take her to installations. We talk about colour. I ask what she likes and why. She has grown up around drawings, objects and conversations about design.
So perhaps some of what eventually looks like instinct is being trained long before we recognise it as training.
And take me.
I’ve never been formally trained as a designer. Yet looking backwards, I realise I’ve probably spent most of my working life designing. I just didn’t always call it that.
This first note is really about that.
What builds the eye?
What becomes instinct?
Where do ideas actually come from?
And how much of what we eventually call talent is really an accumulation of curiosity, experience, repetition and discipline?
Observation
Designing Before I Knew It Was Design
Long before Sculptura, I would redesign documents in companies I worked for.
Nobody asked me to. There wasn’t a design brief. I would simply look at something and think:
Why does this need to be like this?
The information could be clearer.
The hierarchy could be better.
The story could be told differently.
So I’d move things around. Change the sequence. Simplify something. Make something else more prominent.
I’d keep going until it felt right. I didn’t think I was designing. I thought I was improving something.
There is probably an important distinction there.
Because even today, when I’m looking at a structure, a proposal, a sculpture or a place, I’m rarely thinking: How do I design this?
I’m usually thinking: What is this trying to do, and how can I make it do it better?
Advertising strengthened that instinct.
When I worked in and eventually ran an advertising agency, creativity was never allowed to exist completely on its own.
There was always somebody on the other side of it.
An audience. A demographic. A behaviour. A response.
An idea could be beautiful, clever or original, but if the people it was meant for didn’t respond to it, something hadn’t worked.
Numbers mattered. Research mattered. Positioning mattered. Context mattered. Who was looking mattered. What they already believed mattered. What we wanted them to notice mattered.
Looking back, I think that was one of the earliest things that shaped the way I design today.
Creative work isn’t only expression.
It has consequence.
Reflection
The Medium Changed. The Questions Didn’t.
Then came proposals.
I’ve always loved decks because they sit somewhere between research, storytelling, design and strategy.
People sometimes see the finished pages.
I tend to see everything that happened before them.
The hours of research.
Understanding the project.
Understanding who is reading it.
Finding references.
Removing references.
Working out what belongs on page three because page eight won’t make sense without it.
Knowing when an idea needs an image.
When it needs evidence.
When it needs numbers.
When it needs space.
When it needs almost nothing at all.
A good proposal isn’t information placed beautifully onto pages.
You’re designing the order in which another person understands an idea.
That fascinated me. It still does.
Then came paper sculptures.
Materials. Making. Gravity. Tolerance. Strength. Cost.
Suddenly an idea on a screen had to survive reality.
Something that looked effortless in a drawing could become incredibly complicated once somebody had to build it.
Materials behaved differently from how I imagined.
Processes had limitations.
Ideas had consequences.
And I wanted to go bigger.
I’ve probably always wanted that.
Things you could walk around. Then things you could walk through. Things that changed a room. Eventually things that changed a landscape.
And somewhere along the way came sculptures, structures, installations, playgrounds, pavilions and placemaking.
Looking backwards, it feels much less like a series of career changes.
The medium kept changing. The questions didn’t.
Who is this for?
What will they see?
What will they understand?
How will they react?
What will they do?
Why should they care?
And what form can carry all of that?
The Framework
The Eye Is Accumulated
That’s why I’ve started thinking differently about what people call having “an eye.”
Maybe the eye isn’t simply given. Maybe it is accumulated. Thousands of observations.
Things that worked. Things that didn’t.
Something a fabricator told you.
Something a client said in passing.
A building you walked through.
A restaurant that somehow felt alive.
A material that looked cheap despite costing a fortune.
Textures. Light. Shadows. Subtle things in nature.
A photograph you saved without knowing why. A line you heard in the car. You see something. You like it. You may not even understand why yet.
Later you see something better. Suddenly you can recognise the difference.
You make something yourself.
It doesn’t work.
You adjust it.
Someone reacts in a way you didn’t expect.
You remember that.
A fabricator explains why something cannot be made the way you imagined it. You remember that too.
Eventually you stop making that mistake. Then another one replaces it.
At some point, decisions that once required enormous concentration begin happening almost automatically.
Someone looks at the result and says:
“You’ve got an eye for this.”
No. Not me. I’ve spent a lot of time just looking at things.
What they don’t see is everything that built the eye.
Observation
Curiosity Is Part of the Training
I think repetition matters enormously. But repetition alone isn’t training. You can repeat something badly for twenty years.
(Hi, I still do.)
So curiosity changes it.
Looking again. Asking why. Finding better work. Comparing yours against it.
Failing. Returning. Doing it again.
And I’ve realised how much of my life has been driven by that curiosity.
I’m interested in things that sometimes have absolutely nothing to do with the project sitting in front of me.
Why one restaurant feels alive and another doesn’t.
Why people gather beneath one tree but ignore the seating somebody carefully designed nearby.
Why an advertisement works.
Why another feels like it’s trying too hard.
Why a building feels calm.
Why some public art becomes part of people’s lives while another piece feels like it was simply placed there.
Why children immediately understand how to use something adults have overcomplicated.
Why somebody bought one product instead of another. Why a certain material feels expensive even when it isn’t. Why another feels cheap even when it cost a fortune.
Architecture. Fashion. Advertising. Art. Manufacturing. Retail. Film. Technology. Business. Human behaviour.
Sometimes none of it appears to have any relationship to what I’m working on. But the mind seems to keep these things somewhere.
A contractor says something casually on site. A client says something in a meeting that has nothing to do with the current discussion. Somebody tells a story over dinner. You hear a line while listening to a podcast in the car.
An image is saved without knowing why.
Three years later, I’m looking at a completely different problem and suddenly something connects.
Experience becomes part of the landscape. And ideas grow out of that landscape.
Mental Model
Ideas Don’t Arrive Empty-Handed
We talk about ideas as though they suddenly appear.
A flash. A spark. A moment of inspiration.
I’ve certainly experienced those moments.
But I’m starting to wonder whether the spark isn’t really the beginning. Maybe it’s the end of a much longer process we weren’t consciously watching.
Something you saw five years ago. Something somebody told you last month. A mistake you made. A place you visited.
A material you touched.
A photograph.
A number.
An argument.
A memory.
A problem you’ve been carrying around without realising it.
Then suddenly several of those things connect.
And we call that connection an idea.
Maybe creativity isn’t always the ability to invent something from nothing. Maybe it is the ability to recognise relationships between things you’ve accumulated. That changes the way I think about learning.
Because suddenly almost everything has potential value.
Not immediately. Not literally. But somewhere in the landscape.
Observation
I Don’t Think Training Ends When You Become Good
There’s another reason I’ve been thinking about this.
I listen to people much further along in their own pursuits than I am—Alex Hormozi, Chris Williamson, Ryan Holiday—and I keep hearing different versions of the same thing.
Discipline. Repetition. Doing the work again.
Getting back on the horse.
Learning to return after things don’t go the way you expected.
Becoming capable of carrying the thing you’re asking life to give you.
I’m not writing this from the other side of success.
I’m very much inside the pursuit.
And maybe that’s why these ideas have started to mean more .
I’m beginning to understand that training isn’t only what you do to the work.
The work does something to you too.
Every difficult challenge changes the next approach.
Every design that fails changes how you address the next one.
Every project that hurts leaves information behind.
Every client teaches you something. Every fabrication problem changes how you draw. Every commercial mistake changes how you assess an opportunity.
Every time you fall off the horse and climb back onto it, you don’t return exactly as the person who fell.
Something has been added. Experience. Judgement. Caution sometimes. Confidence sometimes.
A better question. A stronger boundary. Another scar. Another reference point.
The accumulation continues.
Mental Model
The Work Practises You
I used to think mastery was mostly about doing something repeatedly until you became exceptional at it.
I still believe repetition matters.
But I see it differently now.
You aren’t only training the skill.
You’re training the person who performs it.
Patience gets trained. Judgement gets trained. Your ability to recover gets trained. Your tolerance for being wrong gets trained.
Your willingness to look at your own work and admit that somebody else’s is better gets trained.
Your standards get trained. Even your attention gets trained.
Eventually you start noticing things you literally couldn’t see before.
That’s one of the strange things about learning.
You don’t know what you don’t know until you’ve developed enough understanding to see the gap.
Then the horizon moves. Good becomes insufficient.
You find better.
Then exceptional.
Then you discover another level you didn’t know existed.
I’ve always had that relationship with work.
If I see something extraordinary, admiration is usually followed quite quickly by curiosity.
Why does it work?
What am I seeing here that I don’t yet understand?
What did they understand that I didn’t?
What are they doing that I’m not doing yet?
How do I learn that?
I don’t find that discouraging.
Quite the opposite. It means there’s somewhere else to go.
Project Insight
The Reference That Point Keeps Moving
This is probably the part of design I enjoy most.
The feeling that the reference point never needs to stay where it is.
Something I would have been proud of five years ago might bother me today.
Not because the earlier work was bad. But
because my ability to see it has changed. That’s progress.
I think we sometimes imagine expertise as a point where the struggle disappears. My experience has been almost the opposite.
As I’ve learnt more, I’ve become aware of more.
There are more considerations now. More things I notice. More questions. More consequences.
A playground isn’t only a form anymore.
You see the child.
The parent waiting nearby.
The maintenance team.
The surface temperature.
The fall zone.
The photograph.
The way somebody approaches it.
The way it sits in the larger development.
The story the client is trying to tell.
The cost.
The fabrication sequence.
The thing that happens five years after we’re gone.
The object hasn’t necessarily become more complicated.
The field of vision has.
And that might be one of the clearest signs of training.
Reflection
Life Enters the Work
There is something else.
Maybe the eye isn’t only trained professionally.
Life enters it too.
The people. The mistakes. The projects.
The difficult years.
The conversations.
The things you lost.
The things you rebuilt.
The things you’ve tried to build.
The moments things worked.
The moments they absolutely didn’t.
The lessons you didn’t even realise you were learning at the time. They all become part of how you see.
Not in some romantic way where suffering automatically produces better work.
It doesn’t.
But experience creates reference.
It changes what you notice.
It changes what matters to you.
It changes the questions you ask.
And if you remain curious enough, even experiences that seemed unrelated can become useful later.
I don’t think we always know what we’re learning while we’re learning it. Sometimes the lesson only reveals itself years afterwards.
Maybe that’s why I increasingly see design less as a profession I somehow arrived at and more as an accumulation of everything that came before it.
Advertising is still there.
The proposals are still there.
The paper sculptures are still there.
Every client. Every site. Every conversation. Every mistake. Every recovery.
Everything I’ve studied because I didn’t understand it yet.
Everything somebody said randomly that somehow stayed with me.
It’s all somewhere inside the landscape.
Closing
I’m Still Training
I still don’t know whether design was somehow always inside me.
I’m increasingly convinced that isn’t the useful question.
What I know is that I’ve spent years feeding it.
Looking. Making. Reading. Listening. Comparing.
Failing. Trying again.
And I’m still training.
That’s important to me.
This is a pursuit.
I want to understand what the work is teaching me while I’m still inside it.
And right now, what I believe is this: Talent may influence where somebody starts.
Curiosity determines how much they discover.
Discipline determines how long they stay with it.
Failure determines whether they learn to return.
Experience gives them something to draw from.
And over enough time, all of that begins appearing in the work.
Maybe that’s what an eye eventually becomes.
Not a gift.
An accumulation of attention, experience and discipline embedded deeply enough that we eventually call it instinct.
This is Part I of a three-part Field Notes series on design.
Part II goes into what happens when that accumulated instinct meets a client, a user, a place and a desire that hasn’t yet found its form.
Because risk is a design element.
Cost is a design element.
Decision-making is a design element.
Communication is a design element.
They all shape what eventually gets built.
And if design is ultimately a way of seeing, the next question becomes:
What exactly should we be trying to see?
That’s where Part II begins.
North Star :
The eye isn’t simply given.
It is accumulated.
Curiosity feeds it. Discipline trains it. Failure refines it. Experience gives it something to say.
This field note forms part of Sculptura’s ongoing observations on placemaking, design execution and the built environment.