The power of listening

A great deal of attention is paid to communicative skills and the technological devices that support them.  Designers in particular focus on their drawing skills relying on them to investigate their ideas thoroughly, to convey the proposal’s content clearly, and to represent the information for future construction accurately.  When their visual thinking is accompanied by articulate verbal capabilities, well, everyone sighs with relief assuming that here at last is the rare person who will accomplish much because both sides of their brain are fully functioning.  Of course, even this fortuitous occurrence doesn’t guarantee easy results when what is needed is creativity and imagination.

Learning, as Andrew Jackson Downing said in the mid-nineteenth century, is a matter of accomplishments and acquirements.  The curious student investigates the facts of a subject asking who, what, when, where, how and why.  Scholarly habits of research hone techniques of inquiry equipping students with skills that can be applied to future work.  Gradual and steady improvement is expected with outputs measured, exams graded and presentations evaluated, and yet one acquirement is critical to future professional success.  Unfortunately, academic pedagogy is usually silent on the matter.

Listening.  Real listening.  Deep, hard listening.  It’s very difficult.  It’s made more difficult due to the constant bombardment of information and made more unlikely with society’s relentless overvaluing of self-expression and self-promotion.  Dialogues that have self-affirmation and self-esteem as their objective cannot avoid also being self-referential.  The point of listening, on the other hand, is to allow your thoughts to match the pace of the other.  When listening, you must set aside your own mental patterns and rhythms, and enter into another way of being.  Philosopher Eugéne Minkowski in his book, Lived Time (Evanston, 1970, 129) said this, “I belong to … differs from having in that it does not center the whole universe around me but on the contrary makes me enter into that universe.”

Listening is a willingness to enter into that other universe, and by doing so, to belong to it.  This means that we need to suspend our intentions and our productions for experiences that are beyond our control.  The curious believe the risk is worthwhile; the confident know it; it’s the impatient who have trouble.  While the impatient can calm down with some effort; it’s the devious who are particularly dangerous.  Pseudo listeners reveal themselves in the charming yet ultimately disinterested attention that is calculated to appear committed to the dialogue, but actually camouflages their single indulgent intent of seeking validation.  To those, the benefits of listening are impossible to attain.  To those who struggle to become better listeners, the desire to learn, to care and to belong to the world of others is a most worthy goal.  This effort and ability is the fundamental advantage a design professional brings to a design process that embraces community involvement.  Only by listening can the designer enter into their universe and to belong to it.