The Paradox of Design

In 2018, Sir Jonathan Ive was awarded an honorary degree from Cambridge University in the UK, becoming a Hawking fellow. Ive gave a lecture before accepting the honour. It's a fantastic lecture on design. One part of the talk stood out to me above the rest however. Ive states that designing new products is a paradox, and it has confounded him his entire career, and continues to do so.

This is the paradox: as designers we must generate as many possible futures, freely exploring, but we must also have incredible persistence and focus to make one of those ideas come into being a reality.

It doesn't sound that hard to resolve though does it? We explore numerous ideas, pick the promising one or two, and then push them forward. It's not that simple however, because we never truly know if this is the right way to go.

If you are creating innovative products, there isn't anything to compare it to. There might be inspiration, and some of the problems you set out to solve may have been already tackled, but what you are creating is truly novel. You are on the bleeding edge of what's new—which is both thrilling and terrifying.

In Tom Peter's article Pursuing the Perfect Project Manager he touches on the other types of exist when building products. I recommend giving the article a read. Peter's paradoxes inspired me to think about the paradoxes that I see in my day to day work.

Creating something takes time, and along the way the products importance will be challenged. "Do we really need this? Is this the right way to solve the problem?" Sometimes the right action is to plant your feet firmly, and dig in. Other times, it's important to use that questioning to go back to the drawing board.

Without belief, we cannot have the confidence to make things happen. Without skepticism we would not anchor our exploration in reality. We must first see the way things truly are, before we make them into what we want them to be.

Our goal as designers is to make sense of the world, and provide tools for users. A big part of that is striving to make things simpler. Less steps, less cognitive load, less effort, less time to complete. The flip side is that we must understand the nuances of the system we are building. Minimal beautiful tools that don't understand the complexity of the problem are at best works of art, and at worst incredibly dangerous. Take for example the updated shifter in the "CAR MODEL" that changed from a typical mechanical shifter to one that was digital. In that effort to make things simpler, it made it harder to tell if the vehicle was in drive, park, or neutral. The driver parking the car at the top of a hill could easily confuse the current gear to be "parked" when in reality it was in neutral. The vehicle could, and did roll away.

The minimum viable product requires an attitude of impatience—where we deliver value quickly, partially, and incrementally. But sadly, so does the minimum viable pizza: a crust without cheese or sauce. When we are impatient we are moving fast, and making trade offs. When we are too impatient, we make poor decision that often have long term costs associated with them. These poor decisions damage the utility of the product, and erode trust with users. When we are patient we take advantage of new information, we build infrastructure that couldn't exist otherwise. However, when we are too patient, change happens faster than our page, and we slip behind, the finish line getting further away all the time.

These are just a few of the many paradoxes that exist. So what can we do with this information? I don't think there's a right answer, but I do have a couple ideas:

Constructive forces must outweigh destructive chaotic forces. In order for something to be build, it must have more energy behind it, than against it. Negative forces must keep the positive in check.

Ive describes the early stage of ideas as a fragile time, ideas are partial, and the value they bring is unclear. His solution is to shepherd early ideas, nurture them, protect them, and earnestly explore them.

Navigating these paradoxes is a valuable meta-skill for designers to learn: Metaskills, as Marty Neumeier defines them, are skills on top of skills, that when learned multiply the effectiveness of other skills. Knowing when and where to move between one extreme to another is part of the reason we are paid to do the jobs we do.

This isn't straightforward easy work. It's an art form. There's no "if this, then that" it's dependant on context, and feel.

If building things were simple, routinized, and straightforward, it wouldn't come with all the wonderful highs, and demoralizing lows. It would be formulaic, predictable, safe. But then would it really be worth doing?