For the commercial artist, the ability to gracefully withstand the heat of criticism is no less important than the artistic skill they bring to a project.

Insight is one of the key resources of design thinking, and it does not usually come from reams of quantitative data that measure exactly what we already have and tell s what we already know. A better standing point is to go out into the world and observe the actual experiences of commuters, skateboarders, and registered nurses as they improvise their way through their daily lives. The psychologist Jane Fulton Suri, one of the pioneers of human factors research, refers to the myriad "thoughtless acts" people perform throughout the day: the shopkeeper who uses a hammer as a doorstop; the office worker who sticks identifying labels onto the jungle of computer cables under his desk. Rarely will the everyday people who are the consumers of our products, the customers for our services, the occupants of our buildings, or the users of our digital interfaces be able to tell us what to do. Their actual behaviors, however, can provide us with invaluable clues about their range of unmet needs.Tim Brown Change by Design - How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation , (p. 40-41), HarperCollins 2009

The ability to handle stress is part of the equation that defines the great artist or designer: an art professional who does not find ways of keeping stress under control rarely stays in the field long enough to become great. Jim Krause