Designers have a special gift.
A designers gift is to look past the mechanical, past the business lingo, and toward the human. It’s our job to take that gift and use it to create something for our users. Something that can excite, connect, aid, ease.
A responsibility to the users, not the business.
Understanding the job of the designer also means understanding what is not our job. Sure, we live in an ecosystem with business and technology but those are completely separate species in that ecosystem. The system works on the essential, but sometimes feeble, promise that each entity play its role. As designers work to help the user’s flourish, so does the entire system. This means that a designer shouldn’t be concerned with the business needs or the technological limitations, at least not at first. Because when we do we are no longer designers. We become something else. Which inevitably throws off the balance of our delicate ecosystem, maybe not noticeably at first, but slowly and surly.
Living at the intersection of psychology, art and technology.
By focusing on the user, designers uphold their end of the deal in the ecosystem. It’s a win-win-win; The company thrives, the user receives a product that improves their lives and the designer gets to have fun. That’s the best part. Creating is an attempt to understand the world, interpret it, experiment with that interpretation, and repeat until something new has emerged. A painter follows the same process. A developer follows the same process. A scientist follows the same process. But UX design gets the special honour of playing in the intersection of psychology, art and technology. Alongside the practical grounding in how the human brain understands systems, UX design also makes room for spirit.
Beyond numbers and behaviours, there is intuition.
My background is in mathematical physics and while it enabled me to understand the world around me, it lacked spirit. Spirit is something that can’t be explained by psychology or justified by data and numbers. It's a kind of intuition that is derived from living. A human touch. That’s why I chose UX design in the first place. I aim to be the kind of designer that brings spirit into all of my work. In the pursuit of creating something no one knew was missing.
