Words are worth a thousand pictures

by Eli Woolery

How does Sir Jony Ive, the famed former head of design at Apple, start every project? If, like me, you guessed by sketching, you’d be wrong. I was surprised to learn when he visited the design capstone class I co-teach at Stanford that he starts all projects by writing.

But Jony gave our class a powerful example of why writing is a far more versatile conceptual tool than sketching. He spoke of working with a landscape designer on his property in the UK. The designer could have shared drawings, but instead he wrote about the night garden, and how the flagstones would radiate both the heat from the warmth of the day and the fragrance of the flowers along the pathway.

“I write because I realized at art school that you can only draw a small percentage of the attributes of an object. You know, if I were to draw this [holds up a glass], you would understand only 20 percent of its nature. You would have no sense of its weight or material or temperature. You would have no sense of the way that it reacted to its environment. Writing helps me frame the problem. A lot of mistakes are made when you frame a problem, because you could already be dismissing 60 percent, 70 percent of the potential ideas.”

—Jony Ive, in an interview with McKinsey Quarterly

Free from the constraints that even the best draftsperson would face, Jony and his team can conceptualize not only the look of products, but the touch, weight, and even the emotions they trigger.

Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that good design can start with writing. Good writers are adept at taking an iterative approach to creativity. They create memorable characters through empathy. Their characters evolve, and they often reimagine old stories with new, innovative approaches.

“The difference between writers and non-writers is that writers go back again and again. My old classics teacher used to say that the people who succeeded in classics were the people with the highest tolerance for failure. I think the same is true for writers.”—Madeline Miller, author of Circe and The Song of Achilles

Madeline Miller is a great example of an author who uses all of these techniques in her writing. Her book Circe takes the titular character who was a peripheral—if important—part of Homer’s Odyssey, and reimagines her as the protagonist. Her empathetic approach to the enchantress-in-exile reframes the story in a way that makes us feel a human connection to the not-quite-human character.

Professional writers also aren’t afraid to make mistakes as they go. Many have a bias toward action, creating the rough outlines (parallel to a prototype) of the work before going back to refine it.

“My husband is a master carpenter. When I asked him if master carpenters make fewer mistakes than regular carpenters, he said no–but they recognize [the mistakes] more quickly. It’s the same for writers as they gain experience.”

—Madeline Miller, author of Circe and The Song of Achilles

Former guests on the show, David Sedaris and Dan Pink, shared wisdom about writing that can teach us plenty about becoming better designers.

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