The early days...
When a big paradigm shift happens, there is this exciting and wonderful time during the early days of the shift. Everyone knows the shift is important, but we have no context for what this shift means or what we should do with it.
Personally, I LOVE this time. People that work with me know that I am a huge fan of conversations that start with “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” or “Imagine if we…”.
Let’s draw outside the lines.
Sweet! There are no lines!
During these early days it can be difficult to even describe an idea to another person because odds are they don’t have any base of knowledge to help them imagine what you are talking about.
I can draw a new iPhone app concept on a napkin with a lipstick and you could probably fill in the details and have a very accurate picture in your mind of what the app does and how it functions. We use apps all day every day, so the base of knowledge is broad and deep. How many times have you heard someone say the following to describe a new app idea “It is like Uber but with a store for cat toys like Amazon and cat movies like netflix”
CEO of Catreessen Horowitz being pitched the Cat-uber-zon-flix idea.
Very unimpressed
Once in a while the universe drops something in your lap that helps you explain what the heck you are talking about. I love kottke.org and read the new posts almost every day. A bit ago there was this post about a tee that is being offered celebrating “The Process” by Damien Newman. This design has been around for a while and I had somehow missed it. It is the perfect example of how those early days of a new shift evolve. The left side representing the meandering path as we try to define value and gain understanding of what works and what doesn’t. Slowly settling out as you progress to the right and the direction of the design starts to level out to a steady state.
Credit to Damien Newman
The Process of Design Squiggle by Damien Newman, thedesignsquiggle.com
My current focus is on XR (Extended Reality), Spatial Computing, and GenAI (like everyone else). All of these are firmly lodged somewhere on the left hand side of the squiggle. New ideas popping up daily that seem like “The Way” and then being quickly replaced by some new idea just as fast. One of the reasons that I love how “The Process” resonates is how on the left there are complete loops back, start over, try again.
I have some strategies that help with this stage, especially around stages where you have just as many “Can we even get this to work?” questions as “What makes sense?” type questions. This approach will be detailed out in a future post as well as some insights we can gain from looking at a couple of other times where everything changed, seemingly overnight.
Until then, trust the process.
