Summary: Design disposables are rough artifacts you make to think, not to deliver. Learn to tell them apart from deliverables and avoid the sunk-cost trap.

There's something I see designers do often, and it's terrible for their design process. They sit down to start working through a problem, and before they've even figured out what they're supposed to be solving, they're already making something polished. Formatted. Labeled. Something that looks like it was meant to be presented to someone.

It wasn't, though. It was just supposed to help them think. This is the deliverable trap, and a lot of us fall into it without even noticing.

Not Everything You Make Needs to Go Somewhere

Why Disposables Matter (and Why We Avoid Making Them)

Sometimes You Have to Make the Thing to Know If It's the Right Thing

AI Makes This Easier and Harder at the Same Time

A Quick Gut Check Before You Start

Not Everything You Make Needs to Go Somewhere

We talk a lot in UX about deliverables .…