Complain by Creating


Complaining about the broken things in the world can be enjoyable, but at the end of the day, it’s not very helpful to yourself or those around you.

As James Murphy said, the best way to complain is to make things.

Some of the best tools we use today were built out of a frustration with their poorly-designed predecessors. Toastimer began as a reaction to all the speech-timing tools that looked terrible. Basecamp was created because no other tool quite fit 37Signals’ needs.

Design legend Massimo Vignelli sees the role of a designer as not just complaining about visual clutter, but as fighting a disease:

The life of a designer is a life of fight, to fight against the ugliness. Just like a doctor fights against disease. For us, visual disease is what we have all around, and what we try to do is to cure it somehow with design…

One of the things I most enjoy about the idea of “design thinking” is this posture of looking at poorly designed tools, objects and spaces, and figuring out ways to make them better.

What will you make to fix something in the world, and make all of our lives better?

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