REFLECTIONS

“Confusion is good, but to stay confused isn’t.” Sonam Tashi Gyaltsen

If there was one big learning that I took away from the graduation project, it is that clarity is as important as any design skill that one may struggle to refine. While this may not be taught to us, arriving at a state of clarity is essential for the design process to bear fruit.

Automobile companies look to hire designers who can sketch and conceptualize well on paper because the cost of prototyping is quite significant - while it may cost a small fortune to get a prototype in place, it doesn’t cost much to sketch. Thus we can look at sketching as a tool to arrive at greater clarity. Similarly, every part of the design process aims at gaining greater visibility of the end user and the landscape of opportunity that surrounds them. The final act of design may not be a huge one in terms of what was needed to be done, but designers break their backs to ensure that the final act of design is a relevant one. Just like any design skill, every inch of clarity needs to be earned and its overall impact on design is everything. Clarity brings confidence, conviction and belief in what a designer says and does. Clarity of thought brings peace of mind and gives meaning to action.

During the systems design course, I had come across a graph from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyiv’s book on ‘Flow’. The graph plots ‘skill’ on the x-axis, ‘challenge’ on the y-axis and illustrates how one can deduce an individual’s state of mind at any point in time by comparing the challenge of completing a task with the individual’s level of skill. If the challenge outweighed an individual’s skill level, then the individual found himself in a state of anxiety. Likewise, if an individual’s skill was significantly greater than the challenge posed by the task, a person would get bored. I’d like to think that the missing part of the equation is clarity. If you are clear about the nature of the challenge that lies ahead of you, you can plot a course of action to reskill or upskill accordingly to match your skill with the greater challenge at hand.

The conversations surrounding design at this point in time have opened up watery spaces like the world of emotion that have not been vastly explored by design yet. If one decides to take the road less travelled, then things can often seem more nebulous and abstract than they have ever been before. However, it is my firm belief that as long as we can continue to leverage design’s potential to create greater clarity then designers will be able to create a home in even the most abstract spaces of future exploration.