Not finished

Textile 2024 week 04 note

Much of product design is knowing that it won’t necessarily ever finish. Finish, that is, in the sense that the non-software world understand the word. When you ship software, as we’re due to with the public release of Tableland Studio which I’ve been working on the user experience and user interface design of over the past couple of months, you releasing a thing that can and invariably will change. I would argue that when you release it and people begin using it in earnest and in anger that only then does the real design begin. By that I mean moving from speculating to problem solving. Only when you start getting feedback and people’s work and livelihoods depend on what you made will you know what you should really start designing. An unreleased bit of software is a sketch really. It’s an idea. Designers don’t just come up ideas, we create solutions, and until we know the real problems, from real life use, does the design begin. Only when you begin to make the hard decisions, which often involve taking out things you thought were really good ideas, do you start solving the problems which is what design is all about.