DAYDREAMS

Our clients daydream.  As soon as they look at your drawing, and as they begin to understand it, they immediately daydream.

Your drawing is recalling things and places in their own past.  They begin to daydream about their past.  They cannot understand your drawing without calling up images from their past.

If your drawing shows them an image of a gable roof, and if they lived in gable roofed houses all their lives, then they immediately understand your drawing.  And they make this understanding by daydreaming about all of the gable roofed houses they have been in.

Designs are unfamiliar to clients simply because they don’t have anything to dream about.  And when your drawing does not stimulate pleasant daydreams, clients get uncomfortable.  When they can’t daydream, then they do not understand your design.

The act of image recall from your memory is wonderfully comforting.  As we know memories are images.  And when there is no pleasant image to recall, your brilliant design remains un-built.  It’s kind of sobering to think that what gets built is the result of somebody’s pleasant daydream.  But this seems to be the case.

Hopefully, this page adds to our growing understanding of the psychology of the interface between the designer and client.  Previous pages on this theme can be found here and here.