Two people lean over a table, sketching a grid layout on a large sheet with a pencil.Meant to show: A designer at the paper stage, drawing fast and throwing most of it away, while being wrong still costs a sheet of paper.
Sketches
Paper-stage thinking across recruiting workflows, accessibility tooling and design system navigation — ideas at the point where they are still cheap to be wrong about.
Role
Facilitation and sketching
Year
2023
Built with
Design thinking
Before any interface exists, there is a stack of paper. Sketching is the
cheapest way to get an idea out of your head and in front of someone else,
and the cheapest way to throw it away when it turns out to be wrong.
I facilitate and coach design teams on design thinking, and sketching is the
part of that training people resist hardest — usually because they think the
drawing has to be good. It doesn't. It has to be fast, and there have to be a
lot of them.
These are mine, though several came out of work with other people. The Critical Alphabet
screens are an interface for Lesley-Ann Noel's card deck. The Comunify sketches came out
of a project with Mark and Saïda.
Gallery
About the drawing
The drawing for this piece was generated, not chosen. Hashing the piece’s name fixes one point on the color wheel; the other two follow from it. The same name always gives the same three colors.
The line under the drawing marked “Meant to show” is written by a person, not the model. A generated drawing keeps what is large and loses what is small, so the detail that decides who someone is can go missing, and a picture only reaches people who can see it. Where the drawing and that line disagree, the line is the intent.
