Triad has been sponsoring Next Tech Fest for three years in a row. This year was my first opportunity to attend. In addition to working at our stand, I helped run a workshop that we had designed to give attendees a taste of tech roles. There were over 300 young women there, and by the end I felt that I had spoken to almost all of them!
One thing that impressed me was how curious the attendees were. That’s a great thing. Let me explain why.
The Importance of Curiosity
I know through experience that curiosity is an invaluable trait in tech. Curiosity drives better design. It drives better decisions and better services.
In fact, at the Next Tech Fest, one of the presenters used this quote from Rakhi Sachdeva: “You don’t have to be a genius to work in tech. You just have to be curious.” I totally agree.
Rakhi also talked about how curiosity is one of the five soft skills that you can’t do tech well without. The others are communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity.
And if you think about it, curiosity’s necessity in tech makes sense. By our very nature, consultants are curious. Curiosity helps uncover opportunities that wouldn’t be visible if we relied on assumptions alone. It’s central to our role: questioning clients about a project’s scope and requirements, asking users questions, observing them, and trying to understand what they experience. Asking the “why?”
Curiosity and service design
When you’re working in service design, it is important to think about the full-service ecosystem, not just one digital touchpoint. In this way, you look at the bigger picture while questioning the small things. I think it’s part of the UX psyche: wanting to explore everything that could happen so we can anticipate each path a user may choose.
A famous example of this is when GE Healthcare designed a new MRI scanner. On paper, the technology was flawless. But when designers stood in the hospital room to observe, they saw terrified children crying, discovering that up to 80% of paediatric patients had to be sedated just to get through the scan. By looking at the full ecosystem instead of just the machine, they redesigned the entire experience—transforming the room into a “pirate ship adventure” where staying still was part of a game. Sedation rates plummeted, all because someone was curious enough to look past the digital specs and see the human reality.
When we practise user-centred design (UCD), we learn how to get diverse perspectives. And explore behaviours, not opinions. In this way, we research; we don’t validate. That’s all part of understanding user behaviour: seeing things from the user’s perspective, recognising that they will all interact differently with a product and anticipating what could go wrong. Which brings me back to the Next Tech Fest.
Curiosity in practice
A good example of my own curiosity was a discovery project where I incorporated contextual research (also known as ethnographic research). Rather than just asking people what they liked or thought about different designs, I wanted to understand the context of how they interacted with products in their everyday lives.
I spent time observing people using the existing service and asking questions about their routines, behaviours and the decisions they were making, including things they probably wouldn’t have thought to mention in a traditional interview. Regularly, I found what people said they did didn’t necessarily match what they actually did!
That made me keep digging… asking myself, what do these people really need? What is influencing their behaviour? Is something happening in the environment or routine that impacts what they do? Those observations helped me identify insights and eventually concepts that wouldn’t have come from simply asking people what they wanted.
For me, that’s what curiosity means as a designer: not being satisfied with the first answer and being willing to keep investigating until you understand what is really driving someone’s behaviour.
Curiosity at the Next Tech Fest
The attendees in our workshop tackled the tasks we gave them while demonstrating curiosity about the user, client, systems, new technologies, risk, assumptions, and the unknowns. They quickly learned that by asking curious questions, they uncovered what others didn’t see or pick up. It also helped them understand vital areas of UCD, such as research, user journeys, accessibility and continuous improvement.
Cultivating curiosity
Soft skills such as curiosity are tricky to teach. But easy to encourage. If you want to cultivate curiosity in your school, university, or workplace, then I have a few tips:
- Create a safe space where people can be curious.
- Establish a “there are no silly questions” culture.
- Make “I don’t know” acceptable.
- Reward learning through failure.
- Allow time for others to ask questions.
- Work with and for diverse groups.
- Have designers, engineers and managers working together.
- Constantly research and find new users.
In my time at Triad, I have genuinely felt encouraged to be curious. It’s part of the culture here. And curiosity is contagious. Which is why I was both pleased and surprised to see it in abundance amongst the Next Tech generation. It made me curious… why?
If you have a question for Francesca or the Triad team, please get in touch.
