What makes a good designer?

I remember attending this talk by Dick Powell and one of the audience asked the usual question like what do you think makes a good designer. He paused for a while and hesitantly replied, "A good designer is one who can draw very well". A person's answer often tells you a lot about himself/herself, in this case i can know for sure Dick Powell is definitely someone who can draw damn well. However i'm very disappointed with that answer as he probably should just go get any comic artist out there to be designer and surprised that he actually doesn't already have an answer to this question.

Personally i think he's partly right to make that statement because a person who can draw well is usually someone who has observed the things around him/her to an certain extent. This together with their visualizing skills allow them to represent their ideas in their drawings. When you are drawing, you are really picking out features, hint, semantics and etc to communicate an idea of what you are trying to represent. Depending on your style of drawing, you almost certain to practice a form of minimizing (keeping the essence while taking away the unnecessary). Thus you are more sensitive to curves and lines etc. Some people call this intuition, and because they do not really know why they feel certain way, they also call it an art. But really, i think it is something that can be and should be understood.

To me what makes a good designer will be someone who's observant to things around them. He/she understands why people react a certain way, how trends are started, why a certain lines doesn't complement another. They can turn a sub conscious decision into a conscious effort.

Lastly to design a good product, I really think a designer needs a good rational mind and critical thinking skills. This is because when faced with factors coming from technology, environment, psychology, manufacturing etc you are almost certain to have many clashes of ideas. This is when you have to weigh what is necessary and what's not and trade them off in a well thought out manner. This is a key point that differentiate a good designer from an comic/art artist. While an artist maybe able to create beautiful object, they may not be able to be realistic enough to do something that's manufacturable and functional. They may be too drawn into their own world to realize people in the real world doesn't behave the way they imagine them to be.

The Ideal designer will probably have all these skills, however i'm sure most of you have seen sketches of famous designers (1,2) that are oh no so inspiring, but still their final products are works of "arts". So i will put good observation and critical thinking skills as the most important point a designer should set out to attain.