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.