Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Erik: How do you use design as a process to solve problems?
Ross: The idea of you sit down, you do research, you identify problems, you come up with a
number of different solutions, you throw away the terrible ones, and you try and hone the
really, really good ones, that's what we do. What we're really fortunate at is that people
ask us to do that on really disparate things. Alright, so, we're not a UX company, or web
design company, or a branding company, we are—I think in what is a really fortunate
space which is that we just get to solve a lot of interesting problems. So my good fortune
is that at the risk of sounding ***, I get to go to work and I get to think for a living.
How do I do it? You create a process. You create a replicable process and you take people
through that process. Fundamentally, to be able to do it, you need to have people who
are super-interested in everything and are able to be interested in everything. It's
really, really easy to come up with good solutions for things that you are naturally interested
in, okay? So if you're a designer and you are interested in bicycles, for argument's
sake, you will do exceptional work for a bicycle brand or for, you know, a racing jersey or
anything like that. You'll do really good work with that. Great. I don't care about
that, because that's easy, right? Because that's what you're naturally inclined to do
that. What design is I think is the ability and the discipline to do that for things that
you're not naturally interested in. And to apply that same enthusiasm and interest and,
you know, intellectual rigor to mining companies or to a coffee company or to a not-for-profit
that you didn't know about yesterday, that's to me the interesting thing about design.
That's what makes good designers good, and it's why I like doing it, because it's never
boring and I'm never working on the same thing all the time.