The question was asked: How many of you have pivoted at the last moment in a project?
Most if not all of the hands in the room went up.
One of the first things you learn, as a young designer, through experience, is never fall in love with your first idea. It's a death trap, a suicide rap, get out while you're young. You were born to pivot.*
The problem is that we stare at stuff for too long and we fall in love with it. That's the bad part. The good part is we stare at it for so long, we really do have a good sense of where we are and where we need to take a particular project. Intuition is something that is best acted upon with urgency. Not without thought mind you, but with urgency.
The pivot question was posed after a young designer told a tale of of a product that she and her fellow students prototyped. They went through a rigorous design thinking regime and came up with what they thought was the best solution. They built prototypes and iterated on them for a month or so. They realized at the end that it wasn't quite right. They realized that changes needed to be made, but it was too late and they turned in the project anyway.
Everything they did was right, yet they failed in their assignment. What they needed to do then is exactly what she knows to do now: pivot.
Leave enough time to scrap everything and start over. It's not as scary as it sounds. If you have X number of weeks, leave yourself a buffer week to fully evaluate what you have and recreate it from scratch. Remember your original prototype represents your first idea. The first reveal you make might have been a result of many rounds of refinement, but in total it still represents your first attempt.
So scrap it. Regard it and it's associated prototype as idea one and throw it away. A learning experience. One that is now going to allow you to build a second prototype, with alarming speed and clarity, precisely because you spent so long learning about the failure of the first one. You don't have to put any of those past failures into the product, by pivoting you can avoid precisely doing just that.
I remember a story by Garrison Keillor about his first book. His masterpiece. Years of writing culminating in his best work. He left it at an airport one day (I think it was an airport, maybe he can chime in). Did he fret... yes. Was he devastated... yes. What did he do? He pivoted and in surprisingly little time rewrote the book and in doing so created one of the most endearing memoirs of the last century.
* This is from a song called "Born to Run," it fits.
XOXO
M. C!arke, CC ™