Tangent

4 years ago, I took a break from design. Not knowing what to do next, I stumbled upon urban planning.

Urban planning was interesting but tremendously complex. It was about understanding local geography, historical context, upcoming developments, council visions, job centres, housing targets, population statistics, sometimes even the political context to come up with an intervention that would benefit the community.

Complex already is, there were no existing mechanisms to help decision-makers overlay information and quickly get a grasp of what’s happening in their local area. Researchers would flick through pages and pages of reports to find the before-and-after effects of a major freeway development, (and pray perhaps there would be a map or two for guidance). Asset owners who came to had never seen how their properties were distributed across the city let alone knowing where’s the best place to build the next one.

I thought, surely there’s something we could do to make this process friendlier.

To me it was obvious that we needed a reporting and mapping tool where clients could easily juxtapose information with visuals to form their own decisions. But to them, this seemed like too much of an effort and besides, they’ve been doing just fine with the way things were.

I rolled up my sleeves and I built several prototypes to show everyone what a better reporting pipeline might look like. I convinced the company board that digitisation was an important step to take if we wanted stay on top of the market. The good thing though, I understood the context and had the technical skills to build what was required. My biggest challenge was getting buy ins from PMs who were responsible for selling the idea to their clients. I tried my best to understand their concerns, usually from timing and budget perspectives, and offered alternative solutions just so I could build up trust and momentum for my products.

I finally won my first major ‘digital solutions’ contract with a client who wanted to develop a data analysis tool for asset planning. The tool wasn’t particularly fancy or high-tech, but it suited the client, they were willing to pay for and came back for more.

I felt a sense of satisfaction, seeing my idea turn into reality. Showing the client the first time, that they could understand complex planning idea without having to read through pages and pages of documentation was the best reward I could ask for as a designer.

In many ways, this experience helped me find my bearing in design and gave me confidence to follow my own instincts again. It helped me understand that design is strategy rather than just service. Being a designer is more than just waiting for others to come up with some specific problem to solve. If you have an opinion about which problems to solve, then, you need to be the one convincing other people of that as well. And I couldn’t have said it better myself —

Design helps others see what a better version of the world would look like

(The last paragraph was referenced from Julie Zhuo’s article “Unintuitive Lessons on Being a Designer”. Thanks for being such an inspiration and role model to me.)