“It’s like you’re looking just for problems”
The value of keeping a bug list for everyday life.
Keeping a list of things that annoy you isn’t just the preserve of maniacs and revenge fantasists. It’s also a really useful practice for designers. This is something I’ve heard from people including product designers from IDEO and data journalist David McCandless. The latter was at a talk I went to a few days ago. I asked how he initiates and develops early stage ideas and he talked about how he starts with words—in the form of questions or problems he wants to solve. Collect them together and you have a bug list, not for software but for glitches in reality.
Actively looking for problems gives you a reservoir of potential starting points and insights that are based in real world needs. It’s a skill like any other, it needs time and attention to nurture. But there’s a low bar to entry, you just need to stop and look.
This frame of mind is also useful for entering the minds of others, using empathy and observation to identify what annoys other people too.
It’s something that I have been doing in an unstructured sort of a way. I realised this when I looked back over what I’ve been making and writing about recently.
Here are a few problems I found:
- I look at my phone too much, to the detriment of my family, what can I do about it?
- How do you help kids realise how much potential they have?
- How do you encourage young people to vote?
- If we’re too focused on authenticity, what do we lose?
- If you can’t learn very much from perfection, where do you look instead?
- How do you encourage people to pay closer attention to their day-to-day world?
- Kids play a lot in the digital world, how can we show them that there’s magic at their fingertips in the real world?
- It’s difficult to talk about how you think and feel if you don’t have the right vocabulary, how can you help give people the words they need?
- The world seems to be beset by bullshit, what can be done?
I’m not claiming that any of these problems or my responses to them are that great—but what I do want to show is that a bug list can spur you into action and that’s what really counts. I reckon Ai Weiwei had it right when he said:
A small act is worth a million thoughts.
Once you have committed an act others can see it too which is scary as in all probability it won’t be perfect—but don’t let that stop you—once you have it outside of your head it’s far easier to refine, adapt and improve.
I now want to make this process a bit more conscious. I’m going to set up a bug list with the aim of adding at least one interesting question or problem every week, and identifying at least one thing that’s genuinely non-trivial every month. I’m going to publish this on Medium to keep the process open and share learnings along the way.
