When I was visiting UK for London Design Festival 2025,
Across the 10 days I spent in countless workshops, studio sessions and in conversations with many talented designers across various domains of design - furniture design, retail space design, UI/UX , industrial design.
One idea kept surfacing, and it wasn't about software or materials; it was about "play."
In this short article I look to capture this in 2 points that either brought new perspectives or affirmed something I somewhat knew before but was unable to articulate correctly.
Really good work takes time to materialize. An idea is like a thread—you pull on it, weave it, and new ways to work with it only reveal themselves with experimentation.
We often pressure ourselves to find the right answer immediately. But great ideas need room to breathe and evolve. In practice, this could mean factoring in a day or two into sitting with your designs once you think they’re done.
The magic is in the messy phase where you need to play a bit**.**
“Play”: The practice of trying things quickly → taking feedback ****→ learning from what fails → moving on.
You've probably heard "fail fast, learn faster." I used to dismiss this as an excuse for sloppy work. But calling it play reframed everything. It stopped feeling like failure and started feeling like discovery.
Iteration 1 might fail, but it could spark something in iteration 10 that becomes iteration 11. When you explore those dead ends, you don't just stumble on the solution. You gain unshakeable clarity on why the final path is the only way forward.
I met Hunnaid Nagaria, creative technologist at Nothing, and we got talking about how many senior people at Nothing have backgrounds in music and how that influences the way they think about product design—not in obvious ways, but in how they see patterns and sometimes interfaces.