Design for Reality

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I believe that designers take on projects with such an ambitious scale as a result of our egos. What designers don’t realize though is that many of the world’s most well-known products didn’t start with global ambitions. Rather, they often addressed a small, local need first and grew from there. Therefore, if you really want to develop your skills and produce a truly creative product, you will be much better off checking your ego and starting small. Stop Inflating Your Ego In the book “Ego is the Enemy,” Ryan Holiday uses past examples of famous figures – both successful and unsuccessful – to illustrate the adverse effects of the ego. While Holiday writes to all industries, not just design, designers will learn a lot from him.
His book addresses the type of thinking that distracts us from designing a product for a small audience, which helps you and another five people instead of 100 million faceless people who you don’t know personally. Designing with your ego creates a product that is diluted, unfocused, and just bland. Consider these well-known products that didn’t give into big thinking in the beginning. Facebook was designed first for people at Harvard, not for a billion people around the world. If Mark Zuckerberg designed Facebook for a billion people on day one, it would have failed. Facebook was online for two years before opening itself up to the general public. Uber was originally a black car service in San Francisco. Today, Uber has evolved from a local black car service, to a global ridesharing app, and now, to a service for lifestyle and logistics. In 2008, this wouldn’t have meant anything to anyone. Flickr began as a photo-sharing feature within an online game. Only after the product had been perfected did the team realize that it could be applied more broadly. In 2005, Flickr was acquired by Yahoo. Today, it has 51 million registered users worldwide. “Ego is the enemy of what you want and of what you have: Of mastering a craft. Of real creative insight. Of working well with others. Of building loyalty and support. Of longevity. Of repeating and retaining your success. It repulses advantages and opportunities. It’s a magnet for enemies and errors. It is Scylla and Charybdis.”― Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy Get Out of Your Head! Designers all have a tendency to turn their life into a story. We write a fantastic narrative of our past with ourselves at the center – I helped design billion dollar companies or I worked for [insert massive startup here] – and this distracts us from designing for reality. We often produce concept work to develop or show off our abilities as designers. What I’m suggesting is to not let your ego guide you toward producing a concept for another billion-dollar startup. These companies became the way they are over long periods of refinement and being patient. Therefore we can only possibly provide an undeveloped opinion on redesigning their product.
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Design for Reality

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