🧠 Day 1: Think Like a Designer

In 1944, psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel created a short animated film unlike anything seen before. It consisted solely of geometric shapes — two triangles and a circle — moving around a box that opened and closed like a door.

They showed it to 34 participants.

Only one person described what was actually happening in literal terms. The rest didn’t see shapes. They saw characters.

One triangle was “chasing” the circle. The smaller triangle was “protecting” it. There was jealousy. Conflict. Escape. Even love.

This wasn’t just imagination — it was a cognitive reflex. A shortcut the brain takes when it tries to make sense of ambiguous or incomplete stimuli. It was one of the earliest documented demonstrations of what we now recognise as abductive reasoning: the ability to construct the most likely explanation based on partial information.

Not what must be true (deduction).
Not what’s probably true (induction).
But what might be true — a plausible narrative formed in real time.

Designers do this all the time.

You watch someone hesitate in a signup flow. You see an unexpected drop in engagement. You hear tension in a user interview. And from a small fragment — an awkward pause, a misclick, a frown — you construct a hypothesis.

Not just about what happened, but why.

This ability to fill in the blanks, to turn ambiguity into insight, is the beating heart of early-stage product development. It’s also one of the most under appreciated skills in startup strategy — and one of the strongest arguments for why designers make excellent founders.

Because in the messy, chaotic early months of building something new, most people get lost waiting for data. Designers? They move forward on signals — weak ones at first, but real.

In fact, one of the biggest traps I see early founders fall into is the opposite of this: paralysis by certainty. They wait for proof. They seek validation. They endlessly test ideas looking for confidence.

But confidence often follows movement. Not the other way around.

That’s why I believe more designers need to stop waiting for permission — and start shaping the companies they wish existed. Not just as contributors. But as founders.

You already have the instinct.
You’ve already been doing the work.
Maybe it’s time to build the thing yourself.

Tomorrow: We explore what happens when this pattern-finding instinct isn’t just cognitive — but built into your biology. And why designers may be wired for empathy in a way that gives them an edge.

- Andy Budd
The Design Coach & The Design VC