Last week, someone challenged me to design something. The conversation got me thinking about the challenges of design.
The first big huge problem of design is that people (as in customers) know what they like but they don't know what they want.
Or put another way, people who dont build things for a living are terrible at visualizing possibilities. They cannot picture it in their head until it is in their hands, especially with software. Most people know what they like and dislike but only after they are already using the product.
Another problem affects the people that do design things for a living. They immediately picture things in their head based on the limitations that they know. They can picture how you would build it but they also constrain the possibilities of what could be done. Sometimes it is a good thing to build on what you know but other times it keeps them from making breakthroughs.
Look at the MacBook Air. When you hold this laptop, you just go "Wow!"
One can easily imagine a focus group person saying they want a laptop that is so small it would fit in an envelop. Sounds cool. sounds simple. So why hadn't anyone built one before?
Probably because some engineers got that memo and concluded that it was impossible. The marketing guys said "Impossible?". The engineers said "Impossible. And let us list the 43 reasons why its impossible...."
But someone said make it possible. And every once in a while, the impossible becomes possible. It becomes real.
There are not many people who can visual products based on what people say, know enough about implementation to guide them and yet and are free enough not to be blocked by the possible-impossible.
Which is why our physical world is cluttered with so much unimaginative, mundane stuff
