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Intuition [and / or / vs.] Data

Data by itself cannot create anything. It can only disprove.

Intuition by itself can create many things, but it stays trapped within the designer’s own experiences and never becomes a conversation.

Both are important.

This is how to design things: Use intuition to create many good solutions, and then use data to narrow it down to the one best.

Intuition and data arrive at a solution

But don’t stop after one iteration; then you lose the ability to let your data shape your intuition.

By repeating this cycle over and over again, your intuition will get better, and you can focus on smaller and smaller problems, gradually approaching (though never attaining) perfection.

Iterating a design

(I can’t decide if this whole post is actually true, or if it’s just attractive because it seems simple and internally consistent.)

This entry was posted on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 7:13 pm and is filed under design, visual explanations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Intuition [and / or / vs.] Data”

  1. Jody Says:
    November 21st, 2009 at 6:22 pm

    Great explanation. What do you think about starting with the data, and using it to inform intuition to then generate the idea?

  2. admin Says:
    November 22nd, 2009 at 4:37 pm

    Interesting. So then it would become a circle, with data highlighting problems, generating ideas which are tested by more data, highlighting more problems, and so around.

    I think that’s what I was trying to get at in the second sketch, but that seems like an even better way of representing it.