After much thought on the tale of the missing link, it occurs to me that there’s so much more to the story here.  That the real reason we sometimes feel lost is because each design path is unique in its adventure.  That to truly find our perfect process, we really shouldn’t use any process at all.

Being a designer.  What does that mean, really?  What are you, if you are a designer?  Your answer might be different than mine (and honestly, it should be once I establish the direction I’m going with this), but here’s my take:

A designer is an individual set with the task of guiding a pattern of ideas toward a solution that is both more pleasing and effective than its predecessor.

Let me break it down like this… designer’s don’t just create solutions.  Because the solutions already exist.  Most designers don’t want to admit this, because it hints that they might not be needed, although they are (desperately, at times).  Its just that the solutions that exist are either undesirable, ineffective, or both.  Even if the solution doesn’t technically exist in a viewable form, various imagined solutions have already been determined by all relevant parties of a project (i.e. “those who think they know how it should be done") - hence, the pre-existance of solutions.  Granted, there are always exceptions, but for the most part this is accurate in all project cases.

So, the designer’s task to to take a roundtable-full of pre-concieved solutions (client ideas), figure out which questions to ask based on his or her experience in those conditions, clarify the bounds of both the design and the code, and propose a new solution that is superior to any other.

This begins to dip into the sociology of it all again, and how that aspect can affect process.  Our design and interface phase, the code phase, and the variable thought-process between the two is directly affected by the unique aspects of each project.  We begin to find that our responsibility is to treat every situation uniquely, in order to get to that one superior design solution.

This is why I mentioned not using any process at all, because by doing so, we are admitting that what might be right for one, might be right for all - which (I suspect), only the truly arrogant among us believe.

Let’s take a Rubik’s Cube, for example.  Mix it up and look at it.  That’s the client project (oh, if it were only that simple sometimes - honestly).  Now, who’s to say that anyone has an exact pattern that’s going to solve your cube every single time?  Nobody! You have to adapt by studying what’s in front of you at that exact moment, and use both the lessons you’ve learned from previous solutions, along with a fair bit of instinct, to figure out the next.

This is the way with the missing link that I wrote about earlier.  That link isn’t really missing, it’s just waiting for you to discover it all over again.

Update: This was written before I had read Andy Rutledge’s critisism of my earlier article, and should not be considered a response to his post.