Deep Exploration

In a world where design is less about crafting pixels, I believe its true value lies in looking further ahead and empowering businesses to make the best possible choices. Design was always about making futures tangible. Now it’s that but at scale.

It’s not just about speed

Attention and trust are limited resources. How do you make good use of them by creating something worthwhile? The crafting used to be the bottleneck. Now the ability to explore effectively might be the new true differentiator. Let’s call it Deep Exploration.

Exploration helps you look ahead. Going broad without bias before narrowing down ruthlessly. Seeing more options faster means looking further ahead and informing better decisions. A strategic divergence before convergence. You can skip it, sure, but it will affect your decision quality.

Finding the right balance between unconstrained exploration and careless ad hoc decisions is a true art of judgment and taste.

It’s our job now

How does this change our work? Perhaps it’s the return of the double diamond, now part of a chain-of-thought thinking loop. Designers who sense and direct. Teams that invest more effort in articulating why their product matters.

Fun

Unlike coding, the important parts of design are non-deterministic. There’s no perfect computed answer. It’s the ever-evolving interplay of looking back, looking ahead, contextualizing and feeling. That’s where the fun is to me.