Interview with the Informed Life Podcast

audio and transcript of first interview with Jorge Arango.

I’ve known Jorge Arango in the UX community for a long time. When he heard about the new book he invited me on his podcast, the Informed Life. We talked about design frustration, the current fears in the community and how my books, including Why Design Is Hard, tie together.

You can listen to the podcast on Apple or Spotify.

Here is an excerpt from the interview below. Or read the full transcript:

Jorge: It does feel like the last year and a half, two years have been something of a watershed moment for the field. And the book, I got the sense that it’s a very pragmatic message to designers. I’m gonna read something back to you from the book, and I just wanna take it from there because it’s a passage that feels to me like it’s representative of the approach here. So you say, “One of the most dangerous myths creative people have is that good ideas speak for themselves. But history proves they rarely do. Ideas challenge people’s beliefs, their identities, and their habits, and they will instinctively fight hard to protect them.”

Scott: I think that there’s something in the culture, in the design community, but it’s true for creatives in general about the primacy of the idea and this romantic notion that the idea is the hard part. And if I can find a good idea and say to someone, “Here’s my good idea,” the idea itself should be so obviously good that then people will go, “Oh, you have a good idea, great. We’ll do all the work now to build it, make it ship it, and that’s all. You can go home because you gave us your idea for the week, and that’s really your value. So we’ll give you your paycheck and thanks for the next month.”

And that is a romantic idea in the sense that it is a fallacy. There’s no actual story of a creative person, even the ones that we hold up to be heroes, that was actually true for. And the first chapter of the book, right off the bat, talks about Paula Scher and Dieter Rams, who are two of our most famous and respected designers. And I take on some of their most famous stories that are often held up to be, “Oh, they’re brilliant, they had the idea,” and I walk through the actual history of those stories and prove that from their own description of their success, Paula Scher and Dieter Rams, their success was about relationships. It was about the social nature of design, that they had to interact with others who had more power and interact with people who did not necessarily agree with them and persuade them, and that was a critical factor in their success. So that’s the first message of the book, dissuading this notion that anyone really has the privilege to just have ideas or just have talent.

One of the main thrusts of the opening section of the book as well is this Dunning-Kruger element to the idea of talent. There are not that many designers in the world. We are a minority profession. We walk into organizations that know very little about design. It should not be a surprise to us that they cannot recognize our talent. They don’t have our background, they don’t have our experience, so they can’t recognize our talent any better than we could recognize the chief financial officer’s ability to do financial forecasting. We’re ignorant of that, but we have the presumption to assume, which is the same fallacy, that because we’re so talented or our ideas are so good, it should transcend the general ignorance that everyone has. And that just sets us up to be miserable. So, a lot of the book explains that perception and how to reframe that to make it healthier.

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You can listen to the podcast on Apple or Spotify. Or read the full transcript.