Designing for surprise

Designers love control.

We map, model, and test until the unknown feels containable.

But the best ideas — the truly human ones — tend to arrive sideways.

Not as proof, but as play.

Improv begins where certainty ends.

It’s the art of showing up with nothing prepared and finding something true anyway.

Every scene is a prototype: imperfect, immediate, and alive.

In improv, surprise isn’t failure. It’s data.

It tells you what wants to happen next.

You don’t fight the unexpected; you feed it.

You say yes, and… — not to agree, but to advance.

Design needs more of that energy.

Because our wireframes and workflows often assume we already know what people need.

We test to confirm, not to discover.

We overfit the system before the story’s even told.

What if we prototyped like improvisers?

What if we treated every test as a rehearsal — a chance to see what emerges when logic meets laughter, when users surprise us with their own creative intent?

A good prototype, like a good scene, has three jobs:

invite, reveal, adapt.

Invite curiosity.

Reveal the pattern underneath the problem.

Adapt to what unfolds instead of forcing what was planned.

Improv teaches us that structure and spontaneity aren’t opposites — they’re dance partners.

The structure gives shape to chaos.

The chaos gives meaning to structure.

When teams design this way, empathy becomes kinetic.

It’s not a moodboard value — it’s muscle memory.

You listen with your whole body, notice what lands, and let the next line come through you instead of from you.

AI design, especially, demands that kind of humility.

We’re building systems that must learn, unlearn, and pivot in real time —

which means our process should, too.

Rigidity makes brittle intelligence.

Flexibility makes living intelligence.

To design for surprise is to trust that what we don’t expect might be what we most need.

It’s to trade mastery for movement.

It’s to remember that all great design begins the same way every great scene does:

with someone saying, I don’t know where this is going… but I’m here for it.