Trust
I had a few thoughts on trust today. I had an interesting conversation yesterday where we were talking about values. Trust came up as an important value, so I asked if they could give me an example of who they trusted. The person I was talking with said that they trusted their father. Great, I thought! Then I asked why...
And the response I got was interesting. There was nothing, really, wrong with it. But it didn't quite hit me as to why this person trusted his father. So I kept pushing to give me an example, a real life example of what trust looked like from his father. And something jumped out at me. Trust is central to what we do as designers.
One of the most important parts of our process is talking to people. Going to their environment and really learning about their life and needs. This also requires us to sometimes ask difficult questions. To have someone be vulnerable with us. And sometimes to dive deep into the hard areas of their lives.
Building trust is difficult. But before we can ask others to trust us, we need to be willing to be vulnerable.