Why Do We Do Design?

It started with a tree.

In daycare, I was not a loud child, but I was a stubborn one. I had my own rules, and I had very little interest in doing anything I was told to do. Which, at that age, was almost everything.

Then one day we were handed paper and crayons and asked to draw a tree. The caretaker explained how it was done: start at the top. Leaves first, then the branches, then the trunk, and finally down to the ground.

I remember thinking: that is not how it works. A tree grows out of the ground. Why would I start at the top?

So I drew my own tree, from the bottom up. It came out strange — a flat top, a shape that did not look like any healthy tree anyone had ever seen. By any reasonable standard, it was a bad drawing.

But I still remember the feeling. I had gone against the method I was taught, and I had still made something that was entirely mine. Something that did not exist a moment before and now did, because of me. That sensation — making something out of nothing — has stayed with me for more than thirty years.

Notice what the feeling was not about. It was not about the tree being good. It was not a good tree.

What the word actually says

We use the word creative so often that we stop hearing it. A creative person is simply someone who creates. Nothing in the word promises quality. It does not say good, or useful, or beautiful. It says new.

And new does not come from nowhere. The way we create is quieter than the myth of inspiration suggests. We observe the world. We recognise patterns. And from those patterns, we put existing things together into something that was not there before. Every new thing is a recombination of old things.

That is what I find magical about it. The raw material is always already around us. The act is in the arrangement.

The flat-topped tree was new. It was also bad. Both were true at once, and that is the normal condition of creating anything.

From new to better

The pull is the same today. What changed is what I want from it.

Making something new stopped being enough. I became a designer because I wanted to learn how to make things better — not just different, but different in a way that produces a better result. I was bad at that for a long time. Getting better at it is most of what the work has been.

But here is the thing that never changes, no matter how experienced you become: you cannot know in advance whether the combination will work. You try it. You try it again. Eventually, if enough people try the same thing enough times and it keeps working, it hardens into a best practice. Until then, it is a guess.

And at the front edge of creating anything, you are always in that guess. You do not know where you will end up. That is exactly what makes it exciting.

Everyone becomes a designer

A designer works permanently in the unknown. We act on hypotheses, on experience, sometimes on hard knowledge — but there is no proof until the thing we make is actually used, for the purpose it was made for. Only use proves its worth.

And because the territory is unknown, everyone offers directions. The moment a conversation with a client begins, the client becomes a designer. Stakeholders become designers. Everyone in the room has a view on the layout, the colour, the flow, the order of things. It is easy to take this as disrespect for the craft.

It is more honest to admit something uncomfortable. They are not entirely wrong to do it.

The real difference between the designer and the client is not that one knows and the other does not. It is that the designer has walked into the unknown far more often. That experience counts for a great deal. But it is still the unknown. Their opinion might be as right as yours. On any given decision, we are standing on more or less even ground.

Which leaves the designer with the hardest question in the profession: how do you get a subjective view through, when you cannot honestly claim a certainty you do not have?

That question is what Decision Design exists to work on. Not the making of the thing — the moments where someone decides what the thing will be.

And now the ground has shifted again

For a long time, even ground had a quiet tiebreaker. Opinions were equal, but only one person in the room could actually make the thing. The client could say what they wanted; the designer was the one who could produce it. The craft kept us in the room.

That tiebreaker is disappearing. With AI tools, a client no longer needs to know how to use the software, how to build a layout, how to draw the tree. They can describe what they imagine and have it generated in minutes. They can become designers for real.

So if the making is no longer the scarce part — where did the value move?