You Can’t Outsmart the Process

If I’ve learned one thing in the first eight weeks of design grad school, it’s that process is your friend. It holds your hand as you ensure that your bright idea has relevance for real people and that it actually works.

I’m putting process into practice as I design an interactive installation that will enable participants to visualize how their real-time movements impact their mood. (Read more about the project’s genesis here.) Here’s my initial gif-as-prototype to explain the idea:

The project has several parts —the real-time data visualization requires some custom front-end dev, as well as a wearable device that mandates hardware and a custom case.

Right now, I’m iterating on the case for the wearable computer, and it’s proving just how important the design-prototype-test cycle of the product development process is.

I designed a case meant to snap into place around a RaspberryPi Zero, a computer small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. It looked great in the CAD program, but as soon as I printed it out, I found 3 key flaws or oversights within 90 seconds.

A quick whiteboard session has already led to some significant evolutions and improvements to the design, and I’m planning to prototype in even lower fidelity this week — this time using cardboard and an X-acto knife.

This process — forcing myself to prototype, test, assess, then redesign — has helped me to identify and fight one extremely bad habit: the ridiculous expectation that I get a thing perfect the first time around.

So, adios perfectionism. You can’t outsmart the process. It wins every time.

Here’s a video that goes into a bit more depth about my process with this project so far: