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DESIGN FOR HACKERS
14
other kids cheered. So, reluctantly, she tried to draw the boy. As you can
probably imagine, the resulting drawing looked nothing like the boy at all. His
eyes were lifeless,  attened footballs. His hair was a random mess of scribbles.
“I’m not very good at drawing people,” she said, sheepishly. Everyone seemed
disappointed, but they still wanted to believe that she was a good artist.
I was too young to  gure it out then, but eventually I got it. All the ponies the
girl drew were essentially the same. Most of them had the same pose.  e heads
were at the same angle. Maybe the front hoof of each of the ponies was pulled
up, as if the pony were ready to begin a gallop. She probably had just learned to
draw a pony from one, maybe two angles – maybe from a picture in a magazine –
and just repeated that over and over again. She was really good at drawing
ponies this way.
But the pony-drawing girl didn’t conceptually understand ponies. She didn’t
understand the “layers” that make up a pony. Hey, she was in third grade, so
that’s okay. But she didn’t understand pony anatomy, where all the muscles
really were, or how they might change shape as the pony changed poses.
 e drawing of her classmate didn’t look right because she didn’t know human
anatomy, either. She didn’t understand the way that tear ducts are on the inner
part of the eye, or the way that an eyelid is constructed, or exactly how they
tuck underneath the eyebrow ridge. She didn’t understand how individual
hairs on a person’s head interact with each other and clump together. She
didn’t understand technically how these things worked, she didn’t understand
how a viewer perceives these things, and she didn’t understand how to use a
pencil and paper to bridge the gap between these two worlds.
Of course, she didn’t understand these things – she was in third grade.
Probably, someday, she progressed as an artist, or maybe today she’s the most
famous artist in the pony world.
 e point is that to truly be adept at designing something, you have to
understand how it works. You have to understand the nature of what you’re
building, how what you’re building is perceived, and how you can use your
tools to make your vision happen. Otherwise, you aren’t designing. You’re
creating a veneer. You’re drawing ponies. Don’t draw ponies.
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