When I get home, I have two desks in my office — one’s “analog” and one’s “digital.” The analog desk has nothing but markers, pens, pencils, paper, and newspaper. Nothing electronic is allowed on the desk — this is how I keep myself off Twitter, etc. This is where most of my work is born. The digital desk has my laptop, my monitor, my scanner, my Wacom tablet, and a MIDI keyboard controller for if I want to record any music. (Like a lot of writers, I’m a wannabe musician.) This is where I edit, publish, etc.
A Desk is where we work. Symbolic. Physical. Present. A second and third home. A Desk is a platform. A hearth. Roots are planted. It’s a place, a sanctuary, where hours upon hours pass.
In my opinion, what makes a designer competent is precisely their ability to credibly justify their conclusions. If you can’t do this as a designer—no matter how successful your results are—then neither I nor anybody else can tell if you aren’t just picking things at random.
What I am proposing, then, is no less than to make a designer’s entire line of reasoning a matter of permanent record. On the surface is the familiar set of prescriptions, components, examples and tutorials, like you would expect out of any such artifact. Attached to every element, though, is a little button that says You click it, and it tells you. The proximate explanation will probably not be very satisfying, so you click on the next until you get to the end, at which point you are either satisfied with the explanation, or you aren’t.