UX is everywhere.

What many of you may not know is that i am a visual artist first and foremost who recently develop into a ux designer wannabe. Throughout my career I have many time struggled with the concept of art opposed to the concept of utility. Although I never followed the Dadaist premises, as an abstract painter the utility of my work was nothing more than to provoke human emotion, as though art were the only way to do it.

We have far gone from the times that art was supposed to be beautiful. The actual concept of beauty is as indefinable as what makes us human. Many artistic movements have helped us to get here (abstract, expressionism, cubism, etc).

But Dadaism came to question everything. Taking already made objects into art museums, questioning what art itself is. It came to shout out loud all the questions that the war brought along, to question logic thought, rejecting every idea of positivism. The idea was to present society with complete freedom of creation and usage.

Going back in time a little further, in 1998 (I was 13 years old), for some magic reason I went to Palais de Glace Museum to see an art exhibit called Impossible Objects. Now, 36 year-old me finds its brochure almost as an ux manual of usability and a way to re think my work as an artist and as a future designer. And why did I keep this brochure for so long? Was I unconsciously interested in design before I even knew I was going to study fine arts?

What we can find while turning the pages of this brochure is how important is to design thinking about the user, and not of what we think the user wants. Design based on research and facts. So, what if the user is an actual masoquist and wants to get burn with boiling water from a teapot that has the spout backwards to point where the teapot is hold?

Or we can think it the other way around. Is there any user that needs a foldable globe? Or the irony stands for itself. How many times do we see on the street a dog that push so hard that seems that he is the one taking out for a walk his owner? Is the dog our client? The answer is obvious. So such thing as “investing too much time in user research is not a real thing.