About 15 years ago I was on a project with a brilliant designer, A___. I don’t think she liked me very much and our working relationship was often fractious. But some of the things she said have stuck with me. I found out recently that she had died a little while ago. We hadn’t stayed in touch.
One thing she said that I remember clearly but didn’t understand for a long time: “design is really about making things with fewer, but sometimes bigger, mistakes.” And I’ve thought about this a lot over the years as I’ve made things. I am not a designer so maybe I’ve misunderstood the whole thing.
Unpacking it: there is talking and guessing and planning and specifying but these aren’t where design happens. It happens in the making.
It’s not an evolutionary process - design isn’t throwing things at the wall and seeing if they stick. Nor is it unintentional tweaking and poking in the hope that good stuff will emerge. Design proceeds less often but in bigger steps. Designers are deliberate and they commit.
“Fewer mistakes” speaks to experience. There really is a discipline to design. “Bigger” though speaks to humility - making the thing itself is how we learn and sometimes we can really miss the mark - that is part of the process.
The other thing I learnt from A___ is that you need ’to hold the thing in your hands’ to understand it. Some of the most important qualities of a design don’t show up in drawings or renders but when the thing is on its way to existing. You can only make big deliberate mistakes on something real.
I try to practise these things - making the thing, learning from the making, taking big swings, being more wrong but less often. I’m still learning from A___, even if we weren’t exactly friends. I’m sorry she’s gone.