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Regarding ease of use, and most kinds of quality, often building things is easier than designing things.
But to build, as I’m using the word, means the goal is to finish building. To design, or to design well, means the goal is to improve something for someone. This means that just because you built the thing the right way doesn’t mean you built the right thing.
“The question about whether design is necessary or affordable is beside the point. Design is inevitable. The alternative to good design is bad design, not no design at all.”
Beyond design quality itself, organizations often convince themselves that their work is better than it is. They reinforce their unconscious incompetence.
dangerous line of thinking for people who make things. It assumes goodness and badness are defined by the thing, rather than by what the thing is used for.
Good designers ask two questions throughout any project to make sure the context is well understood: What are you trying to improve? Who are you trying to improve it for?
This all means we should resist judging how good or bad an idea is until we clarify the problem to solve and who we are solving it for.
unlike spiders or snakes, which enter this world with abilities like web spinning or slithering built into their brains, humans aren’t born with any notable skills.1 We can’t sit up, talk or walk for weeks or months, and don’t do these things well for years. What we call “natural” depends on an accumulation of what we learn through culture.
We often fall into the trap of calling something intuitive if it makes sense to us, and call it hard to use if it doesn’t. This assumes that everyone has the same knowledge and culture (ours!).
At the age of sixty-two, successful entrepreneur James W. Heselden fell from a path along a high cliff to his death. When it happened, he was riding a device called a Segway, a kind of electric scooter, and he fell as he was trying to move out of the way to let someone else pass. Heselden was the owner of the company that made Segways, but they were invented by a man named Dean Kamen.
The Segway demoed well, but in a demonstration, the maker can show what the product is good at doing, and that’s not the same as showing how it solves a problem people want solved.
Even if it was going to solve some problems for people, it still created many new ones. Altogether, the failure to understand people’s real needs explains why the Segway was a bust in the marketplace, finding only niche uses.
And if you can’t solve one real problem for one real person, it’s a good indicator that you probably can’t solve a problem for millions of people, either.
An honest designer knows they have to invest in time listening to customers, quietly observing them as they do their work, or testing early design prototypes, to understand what the real needs are.
They have so much misplaced pride in their idea that they believe it will be instantly more valuable than whatever the other person just said.
Similar to doctors and lawyers, different kinds of designers share some common knowledge, but the specializations diverge widely.
Many winged insects have a gearbox, a veritable transmission, that controls their rate of speed, and have had them long before Benz or Ford attached one to their first cars. And
“The average day involves... thousands of layers of design that reach into the ground and space but also deep into our bodies and brains... the planet itself has been encrusted by design as a geological layer... design is what you are standing on. It is what holds you up. And every layer of design rests on another and another and another. To think about design demands an archeological approach. You have to dig.”
Designers are often trivialized as people whose job it is to “make things pretty,” but this is a mistake. It assumes that function always matters more than appearance, and that style is a recent luxury in our history. There’s evidence that the opposite is true. Some early axes made by Homo erectus were refined well past the point of utility, with the added goal of making them look good, perhaps to attract a mate, or to demonstrate trustworthiness or social status1 (whereas today, most of our status symbols are purchased, not made).
Homo ertues design philosophy
