Mistakes and cows on the path
Why design is a good idea–part 3
Mistakes are small acts of rebellion against the constraints and rules you’ve been asked to work within. — David Carson
Google Street View is designed to obscure human faces and number plates for privacy reasons. The technology sometimes makes mistakes, leading to examples like this cow on a towpath with its face blurred out. It’s a greater level of privacy than you might expect, and there’s even a Guardian article about it.
If you search the internet there are entire sites dedicated to the most unusual sightings and mistakes on Street View. This is a useful reminder that mistakes are okay and that the internet is good at celebrating them.
Paving the cow paths
The mistakes you make are sometimes your biggest opportunities.
The concept of ‘paving the cowpaths’ (desire paths) has become somewhat of a User Experience (UX) cliche in recent years. It’s the idea of designing solutions around the natural journeys or pathways people take. Interestingly, the term apparently originates from folklore about how the city of Boston’s road layout emerged — the result of a lack of urban planning leading to random street layouts achieved from simply paving the most common routes.
I’ve always believed that whenever you pave a cow path a new set of cow paths simply start to emerge. People doing things that we don’t expect.
Simply responding to what’s happening in the world becomes reactive and quickly gets messy. This leads to situations where it’s hard to break away from the models and systems that already exist.
Doing the obvious thing doesn’t always help progress. It only recognises the world and the patterns that already exist.
Cows on the path
The Street View picture makes me smile because sometimes we need to recognise the ‘cows on the path’. This means the unusual, the strange, and, most of all, the mistakes in the world.
Creativity happens as a result of being able to see things differently, and by being able to see the potential of different things.
I’ve often said that progress is the result of countless small acts failures — we simply don’t expect to get things right the first time. Our best possible work is the result of an act of doing and the mistakes that follow.
Paving the cow paths is one approach. Looking for the next ‘cow on the path’ is a different type of opportunity.
Embracing the unusual rather than the familiar
Design is a good idea because it’s a way of looking for the unusual, or the mistakes in the world. These are things that can spark your creativity, ideas and originality.
The unusual might be your next opportunity if you’re prepared to recognise what’s in front of you.
Everything around us can be a launch pad for new ideas.
The future will be as strange as it will be familiar. So why shouldn’t we look to the unusual for the inspiration we need to get us there?
