This reminds me of the last chapter in "The Autistic Brain" by Temple Grandin. She spends a chapter or so describing three different 'types' of people when it c

This reminds me of the last chapter in "The Autistic Brain" by Temple Grandin. She spends a chapter or so describing three different 'types' of people when it comes to way in which they think. Part of the reason she does this is to argue that we should stop (primarily) thinking about 'autism' as a label/deficiency and instead look at the specific strengths and weaknesses of such a mind, and the variations even within autism. But she also argues that this might be a good way of looking at things in general: > “Reading an interview with Steve Jobs, I came across this quote: “The thing I love about Pixar is that it’s exactly like the LaserWriter.” What? The most successful animation studio in recent memory is “exactly like” a piece of technology from 1985? > He explained that when he saw the first page come out of Apple’s LaserWriter—the first laser printer ever—he thought, There’s awesome amounts of technology in this box. He knew what all the technology was, and he knew all the work that went into creating it, and he knew how innovative it was. But he also knew that the public wasn’t going to care about what was inside the box. Only the product was going to matter—the beautiful fonts that he made sure were part of the Apple aesthetic. This was the lesson he applied to Pixar: You can use all sorts of new computer software to create a new kind of animation, but the public isn’t going to care about anything except what’s on the screen.” > “He was right—obviously. While he didn’t use the terms picture thinker and pattern thinker, that’s what he was talking about. In that moment in 1985, he realized that you needed pattern thinkers to engineer the miracles inside the box and picture thinkers to make what comes out of the box beautiful.” > “This is where the three ways of thinking—picture, pattern, and word-fact—come in handy.” > “What all these examples tell me is that in society, the three kinds of minds naturally complement one another. Society puts them together without anybody thinking about it. But what if we did think about it? What if we recognized these categories consciously and tried to make the various pairings work to our advantage?” While I believe the term 'beautiful' doesn't quite capture what design entails, I do think that the problem you describe might very well have to do with an overabundance of one 'type' of thinking (however in-progress our understanding of these types might be).