Why Openness Is the Core Trait in Design, Not Just a Useful One
Design is the profession most directly built on openness to experience. The designer who approaches a brief with genuine curiosity about what the user actually needs, rather than what prior projects suggest they need, produces work that fits the specific problem. The designer who engages with the full range of visual, cultural, and conceptual influences that the design space connects to produces work with the richness and resonance that distinguishes design that communicates from design that merely functions. The designer who questions the framing of the brief itself and considers whether the problem as stated is the problem worth solving produces the design thinking that justifies design's seat at product decision tables. Paul Costa and Robert McCrae's NEO-PI research on openness consistently identifies it as the trait most predictive of creative professional performance in domains where the quality of the idea precedes the quality of the execution.
The openness that design requires has several distinct dimensions. Aesthetic openness, the sensitivity to visual quality and pattern, supports the craft dimension of design: the ability to perceive subtle differences in typographic rhythm, colour relationships, and spatial composition that distinguish refined from adequate execution. Intellectual openness, the engagement with ideas and frameworks, supports the conceptual dimension: the ability to understand the domain the design is communicating about deeply enough to make meaningful rather than superficial visual choices. And experiential openness, the willingness to try unfamiliar approaches and abandon familiar ones when they are not serving the work, supports the creative development that distinguishes designers who grow from those who replicate.
The Six Facets of Openness in Design Work
The NEO-PI structure of openness into six facets clarifies which specific aspects of the trait matter most in design contexts.
Fantasy. The capacity for imagination supports the designer's ability to construct vivid mental images of solutions that do not yet exist and to evaluate them against the design criteria before committing to the rendering work. The designer who can simulate how a user will experience an interface, how a composition will read at different scales, or how a brand identity will perform across different applications is doing the imaginative modelling that saves expensive production iterations. Designers high in fantasy generate a wider range of genuinely distinct concepts before converging on the solution. Designers low in fantasy produce competent iterations of the first viable concept rather than genuinely exploring the solution space.
Aesthetics. Sensitivity to beauty and pattern is the facet most directly relevant to visual craft. The designer whose aesthetic sensitivity is high perceives the subtle wrongness in a composition before they can articulate what it is: the tracking that is slightly too loose, the colour relationship that is almost but not quite right, the spacing that creates a rhythm interruption the reader will feel without identifying. This perceptual sensitivity is the foundation of design refinement, the iterative process of improving work that is already good toward work that is genuinely excellent.
Feelings. Receptivity to emotional experience supports the designer's empathic understanding of the user's emotional relationship to the product or communication being designed. Design that is technically correct but emotionally wrong fails: the onboarding flow that is logically clear but feels impersonal, the marketing material that communicates the right information but the wrong tone, the product interface that functions correctly but creates friction through its emotional register. Designers high in feelings understand that design produces an emotional experience as well as an informational one, and they design for both simultaneously.
Actions. Willingness to experiment with unfamiliar approaches is the facet that drives creative development in designers. The designer who tries an unfamiliar typographic system, experiments with a colour palette outside their usual range, or explores an interaction pattern they have not used before is building the experiential vocabulary that expands their design range. Designers low in actions tend to apply the approaches they know to each new brief, producing technically proficient work within a narrow stylistic range rather than developing the breadth that demanding design briefs require.
Ideas. Intellectual curiosity about the fields that design communicates across, whether technology, culture, social behaviour, or the domain-specific knowledge the client works in, supports the conceptual depth that distinguishes design that says something from design that merely looks like it does. The designer who understands the intellectual substance of what they are communicating designs more precisely and more meaningfully. The designer whose curiosity is limited to design itself produces work that is formally competent but conceptually thin.
Values. Willingness to question design conventions and inherited visual assumptions supports the designer's ability to produce work that is genuinely fresh rather than competent within established genres. Design has its own orthodoxies: the expected visual language for a given category, the conventional solutions to recurring design problems, the standard approaches that clients expect because they have seen them before. The designer high in values can examine these conventions honestly and choose to depart from them when departing produces better work.
The Design Work That Openness Specifically Supports
Concept generation is the most direct application. The phase of a design project where multiple genuinely distinct directions are developed and compared depends on the designer's ability to hold the design problem open long enough to explore it seriously before converging on a solution. Designers high in openness generate concepts that are genuinely different from each other rather than variations on the first viable direction, which gives the selection process something meaningful to select among.
User research engagement is the second. The designer who approaches user research with genuine curiosity about what users actually do and think, rather than with a hypothesis to be confirmed, extracts insight that changes the design direction. The designer whose openness is lower tends to find confirmation of existing assumptions in user research rather than genuine surprise.
Design system evolution is the third. Visual languages become outdated as the cultural context they emerged from changes. The designer who is open to recognising that an established design system has become dated, and who can propose credible evolution rather than either conservative preservation or wholesale replacement, provides the design leadership that growing brands require.
The Long-Term Compound
Openness compounds across a design career through the cumulative development of aesthetic range, conceptual depth, and creative ambition. The designer who continues to develop their visual references, who pursues work outside their current domain, and who remains genuinely curious about what good design looks like across different contexts, develops a depth and range of creative resource that the designer who stopped developing at their initial competence level cannot access. Across a long design career, this difference produces substantially different creative quality and professional reputation.
If you want a calibration on your Big Five profile, particularly your openness score and the underlying facet pattern, take the Big Five assessment to see your openness alongside the other four traits, with diagnostic feedback on which facets (fantasy, aesthetics, feelings, actions, ideas, values) are your particular strengths and which would benefit from deliberate development across your design career.