On why asking the right question matters more than finding an answer

What colour is the letter three? As someone whose job it is to ask questions, I’m learning there’s a lot to be said for getting the questions right in the first place.

This video with philosopher A.C. Grayling has been living rent free in my mind for a while. Grayling discusses the quagmire of life’s “big questions” and how, semantically, there are fundamental concepts of life that feel impossible to ever have an answer for.

In a round-about way it shines a light on the fact that the problem may not be that we don’t yet have the answers, perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong questions. Questions that will never conceivably have an answer, just as Grayling posits: What colour is the letter three?

When interviewing architects and interior designers about their work, it’s often fascinating to see the varied responses to the same questions. The obvious questions tend to revolve around: who are the clients, what was the brief, what is the context, what were the constraints, and how does the design respond to all of these?

For the most part, I just let people talk and add follow ups when needed – the answers end up leading the questions. I find letting the designer speak to what lights them up generally results in a better story. And pretty quickly I can tell where most of their thinking has gone in order to resolve a project.

This is just a random picture I took of the Yarra River on 35mm. It makes me think of two people walking by the river pondering life and asking each other lots of questions, which just kind of suited the whole vibe of this philosophical post.

Which when reframed in another way, aligns to the quote by Einstein: “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” Whether or not Einstein actually said this is neither here nor there, the crux of it remains – in order to come to the best solutions, or to get to the answers you seek – spend more time thinking about the question.

Would you come to a different design outcome if you asked your client different questions when first starting a project?

Asking the right questions requires curiosity, patience and sometimes a willingness to accept maybe there isn’t a perfect answer. Whether in the creative process or grappling with life’s larger mysteries, the quality of our questions directly impacts the solutions we arrive at. In design, as in philosophy, it’s often less about the answer itself and more about the path that questions set you down on.