Founding Design

Founding design is the act of giving a raw, new capability its very first form and constraints so a human can understand and use it. It's the genesis of a system — inventing the nouns and verbs of a product — rather than the optimization of an existing one.

Custodial design optimizes a world that already exists: polishing UI, running A/B tests, adjusting palettes. Founding design creates the world in the first place. It defines how the product works and how people will interact with it, before there is anything to optimize.

Ontological design is the idea that we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us. When you design a product, you aren't just designing an interface — you're designing the future behavior, habits, and mental models of everyone who uses it.

At the founding level, there is little to no data to lean on. You have to design from first principles, using a deep understanding of human behavior, spatial reasoning, and cultural metaphor, projecting how a person will react to a problem, then testing that hypothesis with a rough prototype and real people.

The first decisions become the fixed architecture everything else is built on. It can, and should change, but it will have a lasting impact. Metaphors like the desktop, files, and folders shaped how billions of people think for decades, sometimes making it difficult for users of that time to adapt to new trends. Likewise, early founding design choices compound into the long-term behavior of a product and its users.