A process for thinking Inputs (Your brain (senses Hearing, smell, taste, sight, touch) + Rene Descartes Theory of Vision + Smart Phone AI + Illustory Truth Graph) and Outputs (Habits) A while back, I captured this provocation on LinkedIn by Darren Hood, which got me thinking. What does it take to "Let Designers think"? Thinking is the value we bring. Let's discuss more ways to carve out "thinking" time.
Most design problems aren't 'design' problems. They're 'Thinking' problems.They're 'Clarity' problems.They're 'Too-many-tabs-open' problems. More prototyping. More pixel-shifting. More polish in Figma alone isn't going to help you with those. For me, without clear thinking, Figma just results in more confusion, more mess, and more mockups than I can mentally manage. The Problem: Figma wasn't the bottleneck - my thinking was Like most UX/UI designers, I used to jump straight into Figma the moment I had a product idea or a design task to complete.
Across KPMG's offices nationwide, employees say they prefer round tables. So with that feedback and more in mind, the Big Four consulting firm designed and opened a new, 450,000-square-foot office at Two Manhattan West in Manhattan's Hudson Yards neighborhood. The firm hopes the gleaming new headquarters will not only reassert its presence in New York City but also tempt its more than 5,000 employees in New York back to the office more often.
Most design problems aren't 'design' problems. They're 'Thinking' problems.They're 'Clarity' problems.They're 'Too-many-tabs-open' problems. More prototyping. More pixel-shifting. More polish in Figma alone isn't going to help you with those. For me, without clear thinking, Figma just results in more confusion, more mess, and more mockups than I can mentally manage. The Problem: Figma wasn't the bottleneck - my thinking was
Designers at every stage - whether seasoned professionals or juniors just starting out - tend to place enormous emphasis on the final artifact. The polished app mockup. The slick responsive website. The cleverly executed logo. These artifacts feel like the fruit of our labor, and naturally, we take pride in them. A finished design is tangible. It's something you can click, hold, or admire on a screen. It feels like proof of progress and evidence that you did something real.
Peirce believed abduction was the starting point of thought. The origin of all insight. It's how new ideas enter the room. It's what lets a product team hypothesize why a metric dropped. What lets a designer anticipate confusion before it happens. What lets a researcher frame the right question - not just analyze the data.
Our understanding of the human body, particularly the brain and nervous system, has been profoundly shaped by the tools and technologies of each era. During the rise of mechanical craftsmanship, we began perceiving the body and brain as hydraulic systems and intricate clockwork mechanisms.
