Universal Principles of Design, Updated and Expanded Third Edition

042 Creator Blindness

The inability of a creator to see fundamental flaws in their creation.

There is an old saying that love is blind. Such is true for romantic love, and such is true for objects of our creation. While designers and other stakeholders often dwell on the cosmetic flaws in their designs, they are often blind to the more profound and less visible design failings in areas like strategy and usability. This creator blindness is a kind of meta-bias resulting from a mix of emotional, perceptual, and rational phenomena, including cognitive dissonance, groupthink, IKEA effect, and sunk costs, to name a few. The consequence is an inflated sense of a design’s likely success and an irrational resistance to critique and modification.1