Design is uncomfortable

Design is uncomfortable. At least I frequently find it uncomfortable. There are vast portions of the design process that feel like fumbling around in the dark, uncertain of what you will find, or whether there is anything to find at all. Anyone who has sat in front of a blank page will know something of this. But, for me at least, the discomfort comes back time after time. Evaluating choices, scrapping routes and starting again, and again. Making sense of conflicting needs and priorities, and watching the ever ticking clock that brings deadlines closer. The constraints a brief brings can help with this, as can the insights and further constraints or guides that research brings. But this is a double-edged sword. Its all too easy to grab onto a constraint like a life raft, or to see it as an impenetrable wall rather than something to be challenged, tested, used parkour-like to reach higher and further.

Design, for me, is about creating more from less — not something from nothing, that is the realm of art. Design is about weaving elements together and making those woven threads visible and beautiful, structural, architectural. And that is where the discomfort is. It exists in that trapeze-artist jump from one solid to another. In the air, over a chasm.

It’s hard to disengage that act of creation from the act of judging, of establishing whether this thing that exists is what it could or should be to fit the purpose. Taking this further, the very act of creating changes the goals. Once something exists where previously there was nothing, we have a sort of new fixed point to navigate by. We can now see what ‘better’ might look like — or at least what direction it may lie in.

This is one reason for prototypes, MVPs, style tiles, sketches, wireframes and other ways of setting a point without committing to it. But I worry that people grow weary and wary of these — seeing them as a box to check off before the real work is done. I’ve seen far too many wireframes pumped out and rubber-stamped, and then ignored to not be a little jaded. I’m not dismissing these tools at all, but, like constraints a brief brings it’s important not to grab on to them, to see them as immutable. Instead to see them as illustrations for ongoing conversations.

I’ve long worked on bringing clients in to the design process. I’ve talked about this as ‘removing the magic’ and I stand by that. The design process is not magical, nor is there one design process. It differs from person to person, team to team, project to project. One goal in removing this magic is to lay bare where the work and the uncertainty lies — not to have the client commiserate over it or even necessarily value the results more. Instead I do this so the client is prepared in expecting the right thing. I’ve seen one too many big reveals where the sheer showmanship of pulling back the curtain sold the work — when often this work couldn’t have sold itself. And that’s not my way.

I love working on big, impactful campaigns that wow everyone who sees them. But, most projects shouldn’t be that. Many are quiet. They often achieve much more but never raise a sigh of admiration, because that simply isn’t their job.