Designing in a Bubble

Isolated thinking and siloed development, can create a series of smaller decisions that make it increasingly difficult for ideas to move forward.  Individuals, including leadership, can become attached to authorship.  Design optimization can begin before a problem is properly explored.  The product being sought can become disconnected for the ecosystem that determines whether or not people actually adopt it.  Early conviction replaces the curiosity that enables innovation.

These are different symptoms of a common problem:  designing without enough perspective, or worse, designing for one’s self.

The Myth of the Big Idea
When Authorship becomes more important than improving the idea.

Organizations naturally celebrate the moment an idea is born.  They often spend far less time recognizing the people who transformed it into something worth building.

This idea had me thinking about what actually makes design “good” in the first place.  Proportion, restraint, tension, storytelling, brand evolution, refinement, and knowing when to intentionally break expectations are the essence of what makes innovative design possible.

Real design has always been deeper than taste, trends, or gut reactions.  Good products are born from a dynamic cross-pollination of ideas, perspectives, engineering and manufacturing constraints, insight, numerous iterations, and even some calculated risk to progressively grow an idea into something deeper and more tangible that people actually want to live with.

A collaborative ecosystem makes innovation durable.

Over the years I've encountered leaders who undermine that process, claiming collaboration slows innovation.  For a long time I assumed it was because they lacked vision.  Eventually I realized that, in some cases, vision was actually not the problem.  They had confused vision with authorship, convinced that they brought the greatest value by being the source of an idea.

This kind of person may never feel the need to understand how someone arrived at a solution, better or worse, because in their mind, if they couldn’t see it immediately, it probably wasn’t worth considering.

Creativity becomes more about validation than exploration.

The collaborative process begins collapsing when authoritarian creativity and the need to own an idea become more important than the willingness to improve it.

Leadership becomes performative when protecting ownership becomes more important than improving outcomes.  Confidence is mistaken for understanding and discussion becomes persuasion instead of exploration.  In the rush to validate the original idea, leaders pivot before ideas have time to mature, leaving behind unfinished thinking, wasted effort, and an organization that seems to normalize waste.

Ironically, the strongest leaders I've worked with have done the opposite.  They cared less about whose idea survived than whether the product improved.

I’ve written before that ideas are often short-lived, abundant, and forgotten like a cheeky knock-knock joke.  They arrive in the moment, and sure, they may be good for a little bit… but that novelty has a short expiration date.  Designs are finely crafted tales with the potential to stand the test of time, and can be revisited over and over (and over) and never seem to get old.

Every product eventually becomes a reflection of the organization that created it.

Optimizing the Wrong Thing
Isolated optimization creates systemic failure.

Early refinement is risky when the improvement of individual variables is targeted before their tradeoffs are understood. 

Specifically, when leadership only optimizes individual parameters like aesthetics, cost, dimensions, engineering, or KPIs without understanding the tradeoffs between them, it creates risks, waste, and late pivots that could have otherwise been avoided. 

The temptation to optimize up-front is understandable. It turns ambiguity into something measurable, which feels productive, especially when target dimensions can be achieved, costs can be lowered, and performance can be tracked.  However, if the underlying direction hasn’t been sufficiently challenged, that progress may not actually be meaningful.

This points to the value of front-end lateral exploration, and how that can pave the way for smoother, more integrated optimization.

Conceptual leadership is knowing when the problem itself needs to be reframed before anyone starts optimizing a solution. It’s about channeling our inner Edward de Bono to generate a wide, exploratory array of conceptual directions, then looking laterally again to pull together the strongest parts as concepts begin to converge.

Lateral exploration allows us to challenge the original assumption, determine whether it deserves to survive, and uncover opportunities that otherwise may have not made themselves apparent.
Without this, optimization can simply create an incredibly refined answer to the wrong question.

Elon Musk might benefit from this guardrail in the quest to release a $225 balance bike for kids, whose most obvious differentiation seems to solve more for the brand-conscious parent than the child actually riding it. Whatever its merits as an object, it raises the important question that should be asked before optimizing anything… What meaningful problem are we actually solving?

If the answer is brand expression, maybe that’s intentional. But I would argue that when novelty and brand extension become sufficient reasons for another object to exist, thoughtful product development can quickly give way to materialistic landfill. That hardly builds a stronger case for the importance of design.

Some of the most valuable work I've done has happened before there was anything worth optimizing: looking laterally at a problem, challenging its original framing, and exploring opportunities that weren't necessarily visible in the brief. 

I love telling a joke I learned during one of many all-nighters working toward my degree.  It’s a bit of a groaner, but bear with me:

“How many industrial designers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” 

The answer is:
“Why does it have to be a light bulb?”

That mindset is exactly what I’m writing about here.

Once a direction begins to show promise, refinement matters enormously. But when efficiency is applied too early, it can simply make a mediocre idea more efficiently mediocre.

The Design Doesn’t End at the Reveal
Adoption is shaped by everything that happens around the product.

Thinking systemically across design, engineering, manufacturing, business and users leads to products whose experiences will stand the test of time.

Real design has always been deeper than taste, trends, or gut reactions.  Good design relies on a dynamic system where expectation, interaction, memory, and culture reinforce one another, allowing products to break through the outer cosmetic shell and grow into something deeper, more tangible, more experiential, and ultimately more adoptable.

It’s optimistic to believe that once CAD is complete and tooling is approved, the difficult work is over.  In reality, this is just the starting point where the product then begins interacting with the ecosystem it was designed to support.

From the moment that a product is discovered, a series of experiences that reinforce the ultimate goal of user adoption and longevity.  A product may be picked up because of expectations or a great packaging story, but it is the unboxing and first interactions that will either deliver or disappoint.  The repeated ritual of usage, and the satisfaction of that usage, is what allows a user to build trust, and ultimately build brand loyalty… or better yet, build a brand culture where trust survives to feed user adoption when the next generation comes around.

When we introduce a systemic process to how products are developed, we create the mycelium-like connective tissue of the ecosystem that a brand exists inside of.  From shelf-identity, to the OOBE of unboxing, to discovery of well-engineered features, to product recognition in a crowded room, to a revisitation of that OOBE when having something serviced for longevity… these all influence the behavior of users, and inherently the culture that a product supports.

Well-executed products within this ecosystem provide a platform for cyclical innovation, where every generation teaches the next, and innovation becomes cumulative and holistic.  Experiences are manufactured every time someone uses a product they believed in.  Over time, it’s those experiences that become part of what the product means.

Good design creates the conditions for adoption, allowing a product to become part of people’s lives, culture, and what comes next.

Curiosity vs. Conviction
Good ideas earn their keep through exploration, iteration, and evidence.

I've always loved the conceptual side of design; the work that’s done in the pre-liminal space that aggregates insight into cohesion, and the deep-dive lateral exploration of those ideas while mapping unexpected connections that are tough to quantify but absolutely necessary to find opportunities that weren't necessarily visible when the problem was first presented. 

But I've also learned that there’s a difference between generating ideas and becoming attached to them simply because of their genesis.  It’s that “ideas are a dime a dozen” theme surfacing again.  The challenge is resisting the urge to decide too early which one deserves to move forward.

Conviction is what it takes to get an idea moving… We feel it in our gut and with passion, we do our best to convey and mature the idea with whatever communication tools are available.  We need enough conviction to pursue an idea.

It’s the curiosity that keeps the idea from becoming precious, and the permission to change direction.  It’s the so-called “putting all our eggs in one basket” before proving what’s the right basket to put them in (or if a “basket” is even the best container… but I digress).  We need enough curiosity to question ideas.

For me, conceptual leadership is about creating enough possibilities to uncover where the answer might be hiding, instead of being the guy who has all of the answers.  That means being on the ground generating ideas with a team, aggregating insight from others, and targeting the strongest parts to survive as a design moves from Concept to Direction. 

Strong conceptual ideas earn conviction through the iterative design, informed decisions, feasibility, and the reactions of the people we’re designing for.  Each pass gives the designer to keep pushing a notion, rethink it, or recognize that it should be let go.  This is how conviction is earned.

The best conceptual work I’ve been involved in came from being confident enough to pursue an idea while remaining curious about what I might be missing.  Claiming to already know the answer simply risks limiting curiosity.

"What am I missing?" opens the doors that “I already know” otherwise closes.