Answer the Right Question First

“Charles (Eames) said that the first step in designing a lamp (or anything) was NOT to ask how it should look — but whether it should even be.”
- Sister Corita Kent, Learning by Heart

This is a perfect description of the purpose of prototyping: determining whether a thing should even be.

As we say at the Stanford d.school, the first question an innovator must answer is not “can I make it?” but rather, “should I make it?”

This isn’t greenwashing. And it’s not a gimmick. It’s a precious protection against our natural instincts.

Housed within the school of engineering, we encounter students often obsessed with making really hard stuff. “Can it even be done?” whispered in dark corners at first, becomes the rallying cry for many design efforts. But a preoccupation with technical difficulty can neglect a more fundamental consideration: desirability.

The prime directive of an innovator is to solve a real human problem. If you don’t have one yet, that’s fine. Keep a bug list.

But if you do, then focus your early prototyping efforts on the second question above (“should I make it?”). It’s much easier to answer the question of “should I…” (ie does performing some envisioned function for another human being accomplish the impact I’m hoping to achieve?), than it is to answer the question “can I…” (which can involve much expense in terms of time, etc).

Only after you’ve answered the second in the affirmative do you earn the right to do the hard-but-alluring technical work of the first.

Related: Create Desirability Data
Related: Kill A Pain
Related: Keep A Bug List

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Originally published at https://www.jeremyutley.design on June 26, 2023.