Wookyoung Kim · March 12, 2026
Purpose: the heart of the builder
Purpose: the heart of the builder. Over the past few years, user-centered design has become a clear trend in the design industry. Like any methodology, this approach is certainly useful up to a point. If you are designing a new toaster, user-centered design is exactly right. But designing something like the World Wide Web is a different story. If, in 1989, you had asked people what they needed to make their lives better, almost no one would have answered, "a distributed network of hypertext-linked information nodes."
The danger of user-centered design is that it frees designers from the responsibility of having a vision for the world. If you can just ask users what they want, why do you need a vision? But this is a very narrow way to think. Users see the world as it is. The builder's role is to create what the world could become.
This does not mean users are less intelligent than builders. It means users tend to underestimate what technology can make possible, so they suggest only incremental improvements. Aside from Mark Zuckerberg, almost no one in 2004 foresaw that Facebook could become the operating system of the web. Most users were simply interested in how to decorate a profile page, how to send event invitations, or whether high school students should be allowed to join.
There is another reason not to put users in charge of designing tools. The most elegant tools are born when the purpose of the tool aligns with the purpose of the person who made it. The key to building great technology is first to find your own purpose. And that purpose can never be found through a user survey.
Instead, it is better to spend time in places where you can see yourself reflected. The best surfers I know instinctively know where the next wave will come from. They have their own style in surfing and in life, as if the grain of the sea has soaked into them. The artists I admire stay quiet for a long time, then quiet again, and quiet again, until at some moment they offer something beautiful, as if that beauty came from communion with silence. The great programmers I know are always stepping away from the screen and walking in the forest. It is as if they absorb the hardest part of the program from nature, then return to the desk and simply type.
Natural technology is born from the builder's heart, from a place like a gift, from intuition and purpose beyond the self. There is a strange beauty in the fact that spending time in nature can take us there.