High quality design requires mental toughness.

If you want to find a great design solution for a problem, you need to be at peace with not having any solution at all. At least for a little while…

Problems are uncomfortable. They don’t sit right and they make us feel uneasy. Solutions take a problem and neutralise it. Conversely, hasty solutions can have nasty effects outside of the problem space they are applied within, meaning that they can actually create more problems elsewhere.

I used to work night-shift at a mail sorting facility. Every night a few truckloads of mail would come in and get dumped onto conveyor belts to go out to different sorting areas. The productivity of the entire shift depended on processing time. One night I said to the floor manager, “I could decrease our processing time by at least 200%.” She was keen to hear me out and asked how, so I gave her my solution, “Just put all the mail in a pile and burn it.” The extra problems this would cause in areas not monitored by processing time are clear.

So, problems are nebulous and scary, and solutions are concrete and soothing. Humans tend to prefer the latter set of things. This leads to a desire to find a solution as soon as possible, potentially at the expense of understanding.

Within design, I feel like this is a fairly common struggle. As a young designer, I regularly catch myself being lulled by my first solution and the comfort that it brings. How do I stay uncomfortable and move on from that first solution? Luckily, I get to work with plenty of more experienced designers and I’ve started to pick up a thing or two…