Mutual shaping

It’s easy to think of ourselves as masters of our tools, the sculptor in complete control of his chisel. But I think the relationship is one of mutual shaping, mutual conditioning.

I remember the distant past of like three years ago before everyone in the UX field had switched to Figma. You usually couldn’t just send a Sketch file to a developer or PM. This meant you have to have conscious stops in your work so you could export to Zeplin or InVision.

Unless something big came up, the design was done.

With Figma it’s entirely conceivable to make minor and not so minor design changes as a product is being developed.

Once up a time, you bought software on disks from a physical store. It had to be finished, tested, and polished before shipping because there was no easy way to update it. Now of course, development is never done and shipping buggy software is commonplace since you can update and deploy it with a single PR these days.

Not that the old days of floppy disks and Sketch were better, I still shudder at the thought of merge conflicts in design files in Abstract, but the blurry handoffs of designs and completed software aren’t the only way. We’ve been shaped by our tools as much as we’re using them to build things ourselves.

I’m not sure that just because we can throw everything in the cloud, have real-time interaction, and use a single application for everything, means that we should, in fact, do so.

I’d certainly work differently if after a certain day I couldn’t make any changes to the design files. And very different products would be deployed if you had to wait six months between updates.