You'll have to forgive me, cuz I'm trying hard to find a way to wrap my head around a concept in my head so I can express it.

The test everything trend in design bothers me. Or to make every decision based on the numbers. Or to focus on problem-solving. Or patterns.

I'm trying to formulate a good way to express *my* approach to design, but when I try, people don't understand. I'm aware this is a problem on my end, not yours. But I'm gonna keep trying.

This is a quote from a comment on an article on BoingBoing:

[Projects] are all different. The only thing you can be sure with when you start out on the journey... is that you need to get to know this [design challenge]... taking statistics seems to me to be an obsessive-compulsive way of trying to gain control, not starting what ought to be a conversation.

This is really getting close, I think...

Statistics can provide insight, and they can be extremely useful—at the right stage of the design process.

But add them earlier, and instead of shedding light on a problem, they give you the illusion of understanding. They give you concrete handholds in the misty, ethereal world of possibility. That sounds good. But if you want handholding in the mists of possibility, you have to follow the path where the handholds are. That reduces the whole thing to one possible trajectory. You'll never know what you could have been capable of.

It gives you an entirely false sense of knowing. But once you get ahold of that false sense, you will not want to let it go.

Developers call this "premature optimization," but that's not quite right for what I'm talking about.

Rather than tuning something unneccessarily early—possibly wasting time, possibly risking that you will end up tossing that bit out anyway—you test your way out of mastery. Most people don't mean "your whole thesis is wrong" when they accuse you of premature optimization. They just mean you're putting in too much time up front before you have to.

But in design, this premature optimization for statistics can obscure the fact that your entire approach is wrong, uncreative, driven by "well nothing else will work."

You end up tweaking, instead of rethinking. You end up smoothing out the edges on what you've already got, rather than coming up with a new shape altogether. It's incrementalism, and fear, backed up by "science."

By the way, the quote above is actually about babies. I changed two words to make my point.

But it sounds right to me.