Every designer has felt it: that pang of frustration when you’re asked to make a product worse. Maybe it’s hiding a feature behind a paywall. Maybe it’s adding extra steps to the sign-up flow to capture more data. Maybe it’s cramming in additional ads in places you know will annoy people, just to squeeze out more revenue. It can feel like the opposite of what we signed up for. We’re here to improve things, not to degrade them.
Spend any time in Japan and it becomes obvious why so many designers treat it like a pilgrimage. It isn’t just the neon of Shinjuku or the minimalism of Muji that draws them in. It’s something more fundamental: a culture of care that seeps into every interaction, every sign, and every surface.
I grew up on a steady diet of martial arts movies Enter the Dragon. Fist of Fury. Bloodsport.
Bruce Lee slicing through opponents with surgical precision. Jackie Chan turning ladders and brooms into improvised weapons. Van Damme landing slow-motion head kicks that were somehow both brutal and balletic.
As a design leadership coach, I’ve spent years helping talented designers navigate the messy, ambiguous world of business. One theme I keep seeing — sometimes subtly, sometimes not — is how easy it is to fall into an unhelpful mindset when collaboration gets hard.
In 1999, James Dyson made a controversial decision.
After a decade of painstaking invention and a wildly successful UK launch, Dyson—the man and the company—relocated vacuum cleaner manufacturing from Wiltshire, England, to Malaysia. The move provoked public outcry. How could a proudly British inventor, one who’d made a name railing against poor design and shoddy performance, outsource to Asia?