Design sense over taste

Everyone talks about taste. I think design sense matters more. Design sense is knowing why something should exist and what it needs to do. A new visual language is interesting to me when it carries a message. Ten iterations are interesting when there are ten ways to think about the problem, not ten ways to make it look different.

I got here sideways. I was studying computer science when a friend showed me design. I thought design was art. It turned out to be problem solving, the same thing I already liked doing, just from a different chair. I read what he sent me, built a couple of things, and that turned into an internship. I kept coding through all of it.

The split was never my idea. Around 2020, the teams I was around treated design and engineering as two separate jobs, so I picked the chair that let me spend more time thinking about the product. Then AI lowered the cost of crossing back.

The work I lose time in is the kind with no handbook answer. Enterprise data tools, technical systems, problems where the constraint sits in the backend and the solution only becomes clear once you understand how the thing actually works. Give me the problem without the solution attached and I'll go find it.

I was working as a designer and my Watch Later stayed full of development tutorials for projects I meant to build. I liked watching things get built. I liked building them more.

I'm not a designer who learned to code or an engineer who learned to design. I'm a product designer who does both, and I'd rather not pick.