On the expressive part of making useful things.
i keep coming back to the conversation about whether design is art. there’s a reluctance to use that word around product work, even when so much of what we value in a product comes from someone’s creative decisions.
you cannot remove art from design and you cannot remove design from functionality. that’s where i stand. i’m interested in how those things work together, and why we feel the need to pull them apart when we talk about the work.
What we choose
an interface can have several reasonable ways to do the same job. someone still has to choose the type, the proportions, the language, the pace, and how everything belongs together. those choices become part of the experience of using it.
i care about whether something works. i also care about what it feels like to spend time with it. a product can be understandable, useful, and expressive at the same time. working through that relationship is part of the craft.
some decisions can be described precisely: a dimension, a contrast requirement, a particular interaction. other decisions need experimentation. i can have a reason for a direction and still need to make it before i understand what it becomes.
Beyond the screen
this connects to the work i’ve done around physical spaces. when i wrote about SAFEHOUSE and Oak & Saint, i was writing about working with family, spending time with members, serving wine, and being present. the experience extended into the space and the people in it.
a shared table is a useful thing. its proportions, placement, and the experience around it also shape how someone encounters it. i bring that same curiosity to digital work: what are we making possible, and what is it like to be here?
Giving it value
business needs to understand the value of the work it pays for. i understand that. i also think the conversation gets too narrow when the expressive part of design is only allowed to exist after it has been translated into a metric.
i want to be able to talk about usefulness, results, and the art in something we’ve made. each gives us a way to understand the work. i want people who care about those things to be able to work together without having to pretend one of them doesn’t matter.
AI makes this question more interesting to me. there’s more room to make an idea tangible, try another direction, and keep refining it. that gives us more opportunities to develop a point of view and put it into the things people actually use.
i’d like to see more of that work, and more of the people behind it. show the thing. explain the choices. give the creative part of it some space in the conversation.