On Lattes

I remember one time Malte Scholz told me how he doesn't appreciate something about WeWork at Axel-Springer-Platz. He said something along the lines of "I don't know why they don't have good coffee here. It doesn't have to be free. I would totally spend $4 on a latte right now".I said: "Word!"But in reality, I didn't know what he was talking about. Even though he explained to me that other WeWorks have baristas serving folks free coffee, I couldn't understand that. All I got was: "This guy with his fancy taste in coffee... What's wrong with our coffee machine..."Today I was served a latte in a WeWork in Warsaw. Oh, how the tables have turned... Guess who wants lattes in coworking spaces from now on 🥹...The lesson is not to be less judgemental. It's to understand that certain worldviews can't be appreciated until experienced. It doesn't matter how well they're described or if you're a professional empathizer like yours truly. Experience is different.Up until today, I have never had a barista serve me coffee in a coworking place, let alone for free. All I ever got was a coffee machine and it was always good enough for me. But the moment I received a nice latte and a smile, I was transported into a new world, a world where coworking spaces are a different thing."I'm a user researcher" is what you'll hear us designers say. And yet we only sit in the comfort of our desks and ask people questions over the phone. We hear our users describe their pain we empathize. We taught ourselves the skill of feeling things we don't know through the words of others. It's very valuable but it's not the same thing. Watching a youtube video about Warsaw is not the same as taking a walk around the ghetto. It's not the same but different. It's something else completely.(There's a better example for this but I won't mention it in respect for the more delicate souls amongst us 😉)The moral is not to get out of our chairs and experience what our users do. It's not to go be a farmer for a week to appreciate what's like to be a farmer. It doesn't work. The moral is that we often can't appreciate it at all and that's ok. We can still design well.Instead of challenging our epistemic limits by doing more and more of this bogus user research, we have to stop at some point and adopt a different posture. I think it goes something like "All right, I don't know exactly what being a farmer is all about, but can I interest you in this thing". Trying out a bunch of things and seeing what works seems to be the way.