Tony Fadell, a key force behind Apple’s iPod once explained that the secret to design innovation is noticing the problems that most people overlook.
The fruit sticker for instance is a daily nuisance for millions, but it’s become so ubiquitous that almost everybody just accepts it as a fact of life.
Fadell believes that a major part of the designer’s job is looking for issues big and small to which others have become numb through habituation.
He’s totally right about the importance of noticing… but I think there’s a piece he left out.
Effective noticing is not just about searching for what’s broken. It’s also about finding the hidden things that work. Of course, things that work won’t offer us new projects, but they might hint at solutions to the challenges we already have on our plates. Smart strategies can often be transplanted to new contexts.
The difficult part is that it often takes more labour to notice design success than design failure. In Apple speak, good design “just works”, and that makes it even more invisible than the poor design to which we’ve merely grown accustomed.
The good news is that the added effort required to spot designs that do their job well makes for a strong counterbalance to the gloomy practice of unearthing flaws.
Notice with balance. It’ll keep you sane, and it’ll make your work better.
Designable.blog 