E186 | Everyone is a Designer | Saurabh Gupta

What is that organizations routinely tolerate that a good designer doesn't necessarily?

[chuckles] I mean, there are so many things.

I think, uh, most organizations, I can tell you in India, they tolerate a lot of poor attention to detail.

And it's everywhere.

Everywhere.

I mean, Indians are famously known as 90% people, right? We, we kind of get to the 90%, we just kind of let it go from there.

And we're like, "Okay, the rest of it, the 10% is okay, [chuckles] ...

You know, so I think that

Chalta hai

... that tolerance for chalta hai is too high in organizations, which I think designers really get frustrated by.

And I think in general, again, I'm talking about the Indian context, organizations in India tend to have this notion that you must use every pixel.

You must put something in every available space on a screen, without knowing that leaving things empty is a strategic design element, right? Whether you call it white space or you call it empty space.

So I think one thing that organizations definitely tolerate is a lot more clutter than what designers usually would like.

So designers would want lot of white space, and you say that organizations tend to use every amount available space out there.

I, I think designers approach it with less is more as a philosophy, and organizations believe more is more.

That's a good distinction.

And how do you differentiate between observation and insight? I, I think that's another piece that we tend to overdo or underdo, uh, as the case be.

But it's more about more of dashboards, more of reports-

Yeah

... more of data, right? More of all of these.

But where is insights coming from? Or where is observations coming from?

You know, to give you a simple example, an apple falling from a tree is an observation.

But knowing that apples fall downwards because of gravity is the insight.

Yeah.

Right? And it took a man of Newton's genius to spot that insight, and enough people had seen apples fall from trees before him.