Tucked away among the usual arguments for and against designers being able to code, Mandy Brown makes an interesting observation in Specialist or Generalist?, a roundtable discussion on the issue:

You do not need to be proficient in practices other than your own; but you ought to be curious. Curious enough to ask questions, to read about things, to get your hands dirty. It’s lack of curiosity about other disciplines that is deadly, not lack of skill.

This is a statement worth digging into, because curiosity is one of the most important characteristics of a good designer (well, of anyone, really). Sara Wachter-Boettcher explains the reason really well in her piece On Content and Curiosity:

Curiosity keeps us hungry. It leads us to tackle new challenges when the easy questions have all been answered. It makes us wonder how things could be better””even when they are, if w’d just pause to admit it, pretty damn good already.

There is a very legitimate counter-argument to being incurably curious, though. We might gain such shallow knowledge about so many different things that we end up unable to form or articulate opinions on anything because we just don’t know enough about a specific topic.

This is the core of the “specialist” argument, and it’s articulated very well in Stop Trying To Be Diverse, an interesting post about photographers on the Musea blog. The author tells the story of a particular photographer who spent his entire life shooting black-and-white portraits of people against a white or grey background. Boring, right? Well…

We don’t want to restrict ourselves to something like that because we feel that we will get bored. However, boredom is a great thing! What actually occurs is, boredom forces us to be more creative if we can push through it. Our work will improve if we find different ways to solve the same problem over and over, instead of switching between 10 independent problems. Avedon forced himself to come up with something new every time his subject stepped in front of his white seamless background. He had to find something unique about each individual, otherwise he would fail. The difference in his work came from what his subjects brought to the image, not by some new Photoshop filter or fancy off-camera lighting technique he used.

I’ll illustrate this with a story about my own online behavior. The other night I went online to do something (who knows what it was), and an hour later I found myself reading an article about a guy who feels that Louis C.K. was stupid because he made “only” $1 million from his standup comedy experiment. The person claimed that he could have helped Louis C.K. make $5 MILLION!!! I got to end of the article and all I could think was, “Why do I read this crap?” Well, I read it because my curiosity sometimes overcomes my importance filter. And getting that balance right is what we all need to make this curiosity thing work for good, not evil.

So, how do we arrive at (and maintain) this balance? How do we remain curious, and still manage to temper our gluttonous, Internet-fed thirst for All Things, All The Time? The core of the solution lies in learning what to cull from our lives, and what to surrender instead. In The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything, Linda Holmes describes the two concepts as follows:

Culling is the choosing you do for yourself. It’s the sorting of what’s worth your time and what’s not worth your time. It’s saying, “I deem Keeping Up With The Kardashians a poor use of my time, and therefore, I choose not to watch it.” It’s saying, “I read the last Jonathan Franzen book and fell asleep six times, so I’m not going to read this one.”

Surrender, on the other hand, is the realization that you do not have time for everything that would be worth the time you invested in it if you had the time. Surrender is the moment when you say, “I bet every single one of those 1,000 books I’m supposed to read before I die is very, very good, but I cannot read them all, and they will have to go on the list of things I didn’t get to.”

We constantly need to learn how to make better decisions about culling and surrendering. For example, I should have culled that Louis C.K. article. And at some point I need to choose to surrender all the UX articles in my Instapaper queue and just freakin’ fire up Balsamiq.

Should designers learn to code? It depends entirely on each designer’s ability to decide if it’s a skill that should be learned or surrendered in the bigger picture of meeting his or her ultimate life/career goals. Put another way, there is no right answer, as long as the designer is at the very least curious enough to know how development works, and at best has made a conscious decision either to surrender the skill or dive in and learn it.