What does Courage mean to Designers? 🐬
A dear friend of mine is researching on a series of interesting topics in design for his upcoming book. He was searching answers on what courage means to various designers. Here is what I had to say about it -
“I feel it is a wildly important but overlooked ingredient of all things creative. Look at us, we are constantly at war against chaos, ugliness, unethical thinking, process shortcuts and sometimes simply with a blank sheet of paper. As a design consultant being courageous to me sometimes is about following your intuition more forcefully while sometimes its just about saying no at the right time to the right people.
I have felt its presence (and absence) mostly while nailing down the right problem to solve, while selling an experimental idea to a client and also a lot of times while giving feedback to fellow designers.
Can’t think of one single moment when courage mattered most to me. But very recently while my team was consulting for a leading Indian bank to redesign their digital lending platform, we were all running against time from day 1. The Design plan somehow got shoehorned into couple of weeks. This left us with little time to envision disruptive solutions.
We were not exploring unconventional design patterns which kept bothering me internally. Just 2 days before the first board meeting with the who’s who from the bank, I decided on the spur of the moment to track back & create something afresh. My team slogged to make a concept from scratch which was lot more far-fetched but clearly demonstrated our ability as consultants to use the right power of design. Without the courage in that moment to challenge our first & safe solution, I wouldn’t have done this.
By the way, in the same project I think I got lot more courageous with time :) I had to show resistance to dark patterns (like pre-checked checkboxes), gender biases in user testing samples, tactical thinking of ux design as screen design et al.”
Would love to hear your thoughts on meaning of courage in your design life.
P.S. The photo above is from an art festival that happened in Delhi.