Make It Work vs. Make It Good

There are two wolves inside of me, lol. Some days I want to be a “designer”. Other days I want to be a “developer”. On the days I find myself wanting to feed the developer, it’s often because making something “work” seems easier (and more impressive) than making something “good”. Making something function often results in a reaction of “Wow, that’s so cool! It didn’t work before and now it does! And I could’ve never made that, nice job!” And sometimes it’s like, good job, you made a bear ride a unicycle. Not really what bears are supposed to do — and they’ll probably never be good at it — but it’s novel and functioning! However, the task of making something good — of arriving at a solution that is obvious — is often met with a kind of ambivalence, like “Nice work…I guess? Seems obvious tbh.” That’s the work of design: to make something so good, it’s obvious. But there’s often little acclaim for the obvious because, well, it’s so obvious (in hindsight). This plays out in many different…