← Blog from Guindo Design, Strategic Digital Product Design
Soft
For many years now, whenever I have a stressful time, I have been repeating the same psalm to myself: “You are not a surgeon, you are not an architect, one mistake of yours does not mean the loss of human lives”. I did qualify the psalm a long time ago, when I started working on health-related projects, but then again, I didn't have a person's heart in my hands, and that reduced the anxiety a bit.
Although we work in User Experience, we rarely look the user in the eye when he is tinkering with our work, except in the increasingly rare user tests, but let's face it, we always do it from the sidelines and we never admit in front of him that we are responsible for the error.
I have always believed that the material and the medium you work with condition your character, although we intellectualise our work too much, the final project is still a mere virtual tool projected onto a screen. A malleable, soft tool that can be modified with a certain agility if it does not fulfil its task correctly.
While this feature lends great complexity to our work, it does have a double standard in how we approach it. Let us accept that the professional community has been slow to introduce rigour and methodology to digital products. The current success and buoyancy of the sector, given the current downturn, is no more or less the result of the lessons we learned more than 10 years ago in the “dot com bubble”. It is difficult to introduce rigour, methodology and process in a medium that is as malleable as plasticine. Sometimes I wonder if we would approach our work in the same way if we were to carve projects in stone, if a failure in the calculation of the strategy of the tunnel boring machine's trajectory would imply a collapse in the foundations of the historical buildings it caresses in its path.
Our work is reversible, degradable, ephemeral and often futuristic, and that sometimes brings it closer to the realm of the performance than that of design. So let's try not to overact, and not to deploy more means than necessary to do our job. The final job of a set designer is to set the scene, not to overwhelm the actors with sketches of their work.