When it rains

it pours, and designers should collect the abundance of water now to save a trip to the reservoir later.

Crisis can lead to amazing ideas. It forces us to confront the truth about how our systems work, or rather, don’t.

Many of us remember the engineers and designers who 3D printed ventilators for over-capacity hospitals.

Crisis is not something we should seek in order to design great healthcare tools, but it shows that purpose can best drive a creator’s work. Vulnerabilities in our system were highlighted, finely tuned processes were upended from market instability and new consumer behaviors forced new design thinking.

It’s urgency. Urgency caused by the rain to solve the problem of getting wet, and by the opportunity to solve the problem of needing to drink.