It’s time we face facts: there’s really only one way to design. And to design that one way, there’s only one tool we should be using. Moreover, there’s only one process that leads to successful outcomes. And there’s only one set of artifacts worth developing.
Or not.
I was recently griping about a certain Design Guru. In fairness, I was griping about the whole category of design gurus. You know, the ones who impart the wisdom of the One True Way. But really, this one guru, because he’s just so certain about everything. He speaks (and tweets) in absolutes, and if anyone disagrees, his response is swift and reproachful, as if to suggest disagreement can only come from apostates or, worse, hacks. “You used lorem ipsum because the copy wasn’t ready? You’re destroying our profession! Turn in your license!”
And he’s popular. (I’m not going to name names. What’s the point? He could be any one of dozens of design gurus.)
I’ve been designing in The Real World for quite some time. At the risk of carbon dating myself, I’ve been doing it longer than most of these gurus. In fact, many of them don’t do any professional design at all; instead they consult on how professional designers should be designing. They give lectures, write books, and many seem to tweet for hours on end.¹ What a joy to be so liberated from the constraints of our workaday reality.
Credit where credit’s due, however: these gurus are right about a lot of things. In fact, they’re right about most things. But there’s right, and then there’s reality. Reality is messy, grungy, and just so far from the stock photos of people brainstorming around a whiteboard. (Where’s the shot of the good-looking guy with the perfect hair wielding a Dry Erase marker like a stiletto because his colleagues can’t wrap their heads around why they need to do more user research?)
What bugs me most, though, is not the strongly held opinions or the idealistic framework in which those opinions exist. It’s the punitive tone that infuses their dialectic. It’s the harshness. It feels mean-spirited, ungenerous, exclusionary.
But I think that didactic, monotheistic approach is intentional. It’s what makes them successful as gurus. People want Truth. Actually, they want simple, singluar truths, not messy, ambiguous ones. Also, they want to belong to an in-group, and what better way to create an in-group than to create an out-group comprised of heretics who dare to say, “Well maybe, or maybe not…” (One of my teenage sons sighs heavily when I start to answer a question with, “Well, it depends…” Ugh. Buy a viewpoint, man!)
One of my favorite mantras comes from the movie Croupier: “Hang on tightly, let go lightly.” I generally employ it when I’m helping a colleague (or myself) accept that something we wanted just isn’t going to be. We fought the good fight, we did our best, and we lost. Boo. But! We live to fight another day! We may not have made the C-Suite see the light this time, but there’s always tomorrow!
I think this mantra applies to all the right and wrong stuff about design, too. You try to make the best decisions you can. You rely on experience, knowledge, talent and (hopefully) research. And then you learn that what you thought was best maybe wasn’t. Or maybe it was best, but not in that particular situation. Designers have to be scrappy, flexible, and willing to do what it takes to get the job done. (I’m imagining this being sung á la Hamilton.) When someone says, “No, you can’t do it that way,” sometimes you have to do it another way, especially if they sign your checks. Them’s the breaks.
The other little mantra that’s been banging around my head lately: “Two apparently contradictory things can both be true.”² Mostly, I’ve been thinking about this in the context of our current socio-political environment where acknowledging that a contrary opinion might have a scintilla of validity is a sort of cardinal thought crime, but it applies to the design profession as well.
I’ve always thought of binary thinking as a kind of sad and usually self-imposed limitation. Meanwhile, studies have shown that an ability to embrace contradictory constraints (i.e., truths) can lead to increased creativity and greater innovation. I mean, everyone from Einstein to the guy who invented Pringles used the Janusian Process to overcome obstacles and achieve greatness. Why can’t we?
Sometimes Process X is the only way to do a thing, and sometimes Process Y is. And sometimes both are! Some designers should code, some should not. Sometimes we need to wireframe, sometimes we don’t. Sometimes personas, sometimes archetypes. Sometimes we need to work faster, sometimes we need to work deeper, and sometimes we need to do both at the same time. It sounds impossible, but it’s not. We adjust and adapt. The methods and tools matter, but not so much as our ability to embrace ambiguity and adapt accordingly.
This was brought home to me the time I took over a big project from an HCIguy. As a UX’er, I looked at his notes and work files and thought, “Holy sh*t, this guy’s really smart. There’s no way I’m going to be able to finish his work.”
I was getting locked into thinking the HCI approach—the way the project started—was the only way to finish it. Then it dawned on me: I’d worked on dozens of similar projects using a UX approach. HCI was good, but it wasn’t the only way to peel this potato. Duh. After a brief scramble back to First Principles, I was off and running, and the project ultimately shipped successfully.
I guess there’s little chance I’m going to become a Design Guru anytime soon. My convictions are just too flexible. Sure, I have some strongly held opinions. But in the back of my mind there’s always this pesky little voice saying, “But what if you’re wrong?”
Good news: in any given situation, I am most certainly wrong, at least a little bit. And so are you! There’s no absolute right in design. There’s more right and less right and more wrong and less wrong, but never 100% right or 100% wrong. If there were, we’d launch a thing once and never do another bit of work on it. All our processes and tooling would be perfect as they are. We’d never get any negative feedback or subpar market results because we’d always be doing the right thing with the right tools toward the right ends right from the start…right? Ha! No.
This is where the “art” part comes in. Not in the ornamentation but in the process itself. We’re more like Pollock than Spock, wondering if that last drip was the final drip, or if we need to swing our brush just one more time.³
The challenge is to get comfortable with the ambiguity of it all. To feel confident we’re making the most right decision or the least wrong decision in any given scenario. We do this by honing our craft, building our knowledge, doing our research and, yes, listening to gurus. (Albeit with a grain of salt.)
So maybe this is my pitch: do your best. Try your hardest. Get as smart and skilled as you can. Learn to accept that there’s no perfect process, no perfect set of tools, no perfect truths, and no single person who knows it all. We’re all just muddling along, figuring it out as we go.
What a boring profession this would be if, in fact, there really were only one way to do things. I mean, a big part of what makes our work interesting is that we rarely know where it will take us and, just as often, we have only a few ideas about how to get there. Sort of like being dropped in a foreign land, given a bunch of spare parts to build a vehicle, and told to figure out how to get to a place we know almost nothing about.
Why not enjoy the messy uncertainty of it all? At least until we’re replaced by GPT.
¹ I don’t mean to impugn the character of designers who give talks, write books, and tweet all day. Many of them are brilliant and helpful. I’m reserving my ire for a certain kind of pedantic design guru.
² Dialetheism, or true contradictions, is a fascinating and confounding area of philosophy. But here I’m thinking less about logical paradoxes and more about differing, even oppositional, perspectives, both of which are true. To a child in a field, the Earth is standing still. To an astrophysicist, the Earth is never not in various states of motion.
³ Taking in a Pollock many years ago, one of my sons turned to me and said, “How did he know when he was done?”