To be a Better Designer, Attend to Your Pain

We experience tension
when there’s a conflict
between what we expect or need
VS what we have
instead.

Design begins
when we take responsibility
for clarifying,
prioritizing,
and addressing
our tension.

Say we expect computers
to be more usable.
We begin to design
the moment we take responsibility
for clarifying,
prioritizing,
and addressing
this tension.

We don’t always design, though.

Sometimes
we push responsibility
away.

We blame.

This is normal.

Especially when tension
accompanies pain.

If we wish to design
may we attend to our pain
immediately.

Before it becomes
an untreated wound.

A wound that can be irritated
unexpectedly,
leaving us
with such a low threshold
for tension
that we end up spending
too much of our time blaming
instead of designing.