Papa’s Mechanical Fish?
My oldest child is learning to read and so a lot of evenings are spent slowly and tediously sounding out words from his daily library book. Most days, the stories do very little for me.. I’ve either read them a million times in my life, or they’re just not particularly good. But my child brought home a book recently that really resonated with me and my experience as a designer.
Papa’s Mechanical Fish is about a wild inventor who just couldn’t seem to come up with a successful invention, so he takes his young family fishing. While there, one of his children poses a question: I wonder what it’s like to be a fish. The inventor dashes back to his workshop and creates the Whitefish I, a crude device he can sit in, with a pole out the bottom to push along the lake floor and a tube out the top to breathe. His family crosses their fingers as he launches himself into the lake, and… it doesn’t work.
As he comes up to the dock, his family poses questions about what went wrong; the inventor dashes back to his workshop and cranks out Whitefish II, which features pedals instead of a pole. Another failure, another round of questions and observations… then back at it to produce Whitefish III (with new copper siding and levers… another fail), and eventually Whitefish IV complete with an air-compression cooling system and other features, which is so successful he takes his whole family on an underwater trip in Lake Michigan.
The story is based on the true life of Lodner Phillips, who made significant improvements to the submarine.
I found key elements of Phillips’s story very relatable.
He iterated.
He didn’t win on the first try, so he excitedly went back to the drawing board and made tweaks. His family asked questions and posed thoughtful observations. Each iteration was an improvement on the first.
As a designer, I can’t be expected to nail it on the first go. My designs start in my head, I map out experiences on paper, sketch and erase, draw and command+Z, upload and archive. Next, those designs are shared with a small team of peers, then later a group of test participants, then again with peers..and ultimately with users. At each point, designs are adjusted and tweaked.. hopefully for the better. Once in the product, we measure the design’s success, then reassess and tweak some more! It really never ends.
He definitely wasn’t afraid to fail.
He launched himself into Lake Michigan multiple times in a device that may or may not be effective… that takes some guts (and maybe some madness). He learned from each failure and applied what he learned to his design.
Often and admittedly, the fear of failure restricts the creativity of my designs. Product requirements are too vague (or too specific, both a curse), the product is riddled with existing issues that affect this particular project, projects shift around and things are shelved/forgotten about… So fear keeps me from pushing the envelope and getting the right solution out there. Like anything, I as a designer am also a work in progress.
His family challenged (and supported) him.
They stood by the dock with their fingers crossed as their crazy dad jumped into the water. Instead of criticizing his failures, they offered insight and pushed him to continue his work. They gave him space and time to make changes. And ultimately, they got to take a trip in his successful design.
Thankfully, my design and dev family has always been like Phillips’s… kind, but always pushing me to deliver more; asking questions to get me to think in a new way, challenging me with edge cases, pushing for consistency and quality. The same can’t always be said when you expand into the larger world of stakeholders (support reps taking angry customer calls, frustrated salespeople who can’t make a sale, upper-level management who expect you to deliver the $$). I have found the most successful projects are those that have people aligned from the beginning on the value of the thing that we’re creating together — it creates ownership and allows everyone to enjoy the ride and the end result.
The design process can yield terrific results when it’s seen through with passion and great care. And the best designers are those who keep refining, keep thinking, keep asking, keep failing, and just keep at it. I’m glad my 6-year-old brought home a book to remind me of that. I may just have to get a copy for my desk.