We all want to solve problems, right? What good is design, research, or strategy if nothing concrete ever gets built?

And yet I keep running into the same question: why are we so obsessed with things that look ready? With outputs that are visual, tangible, and immediately legible, even when they are conceptually empty?

Somewhere along the way, conceptual thinking and discussion became suspect. As if asking the wrong questions were worse than confidently answering the wrong ones. Slowing down had become a radical act no one seemed ready to propose, let alone commit to.

I honestly thought that within UX and product design we had buried this way of thinking. Along with the myth of the “genius designer” who magically produces polished layouts in arcane tools for the rest of us to admire. I’ve always thought of this as the layout machine era. In Finnish, leiskakone captures it perfectly: the idea that design legitimacy emerges once something visual exists. A polished surface dictating primarily how something looks.

Apparently, the machine never fully shut down.

That became particularly visible to me after returning to Finland, having spent most of my adult life studying and working in English and building my career in the United Kingdom. Changing not just workplaces, but the geographical and linguistic context in which you operate has a way of exposing which practices are cultural rather than inevitable.

As a native Finn, I expected differences. I was not prepared for just how deeply solution-first thinking and the authority of visual artefacts, is embedded in Finnish design practice and much rather stakeholder expectations, particularly within what is still rather archaically referred to simply as “IT”.

If it’s not visual, it’s not real

A recurring pattern I’ve encountered is this: stakeholders are only willing to engage once there is something concrete and visual to react to. And once that visual exists, the conversation collapses into surface-level critique.

People question what they see. They rarely question whether what they see should exist at all.

You are asked for a solution, often prematurely, and there is very little room to challenge the premise. No matter how carefully you argue, the request stands. Collaboration becomes performative. Alignment is assumed, not built. Learning does not stop, it has not even started.

Being solution-driven is understandable. There is comfort in a tangible deliverable. But what good is it if the solution does not actually work as intended?

At that point, goals are missed, resources are wasted, and everyone quietly moves on to the next “fix”.

The cult of the digital solution

In Finnish design discourse, the solution is often implicitly defined before any real inquiry begins. It will be digital. A website. A platform. A system.

“Digital” is treated as a destination rather than a tool.

For years now, the language around this has reinforced the idea that we must leap into some separate digital reality at all costs. We talk about making a digital leap (digiloikka), about digi-this and digi-that, as if these were realities of their own rather than aspects of everyday human life.

But digitalisation, on its own, rarely fixes anything.

Digital first, humans later

An example I came across had nothing to do with my own work. It came from a morning television discussion some time ago, where two educational experts argued that schools now need to make a reverse digital leap.

Why? Because moving the majority of educational materials and testing to digital formats has had a measurable negative impact on students’ health and learning outcomes.

This surprised no one who understands how humans learn.

One of the experts described how physical books create spatial, visual, and tactile memory. You remember where information sits on a page. You can find it again. Prolonged digital device use, both at school and at home, has also reduced children’s ability to concentrate.

Interestingly, the conversation still framed “learning digital skills” as something separate from life itself. As if children were not already immersed in digital environments by default. Treating “more digital” as inherently positive, whether the goal is efficiency or speed or something else, appears in many contexts beyond education. Yet within an educational context, it feels staggering that the conversation has remained so incredibly narrow for so long, overlooking potential negative consequences in the long term.

The real failure here was not digitalisation. It is the refusal to consider human cognition before committing to a solution. My hope is that these reflections and findings will not go underutilised.

What this has to do with design?

Design is facing the same mistake at a different scale.

When we commit to solutions too blindly, especially ones that are visually or technologically impressive, we stop asking questions that matter. We optimise for execution instead of understanding. We confuse activity with progress.

Being relentlessly solution-driven will eventually undermine the very outcomes we claim to care about. The technology or the solution itself is rarely the saviour. However the hopes for it are sky high.

It’s like performing your way through life: as long as nothing unexpected happens, the script holds. The moment reality deviates, the performance collapses.

So what do we do instead?

We need to collaborate around shared, measurable goals and deliberately leave the solution out of the equation for as long as possible.

That requires discomfort.

It requires listening instead of defending individual positions. It requires trust in collective thinking rather than individual expertise. And it requires accepting that adaptability is more valuable than certainty.

We need:

→ To let go of solutions and become more adaptable in how we think and work. Face the problems and question them head on.

→ To embrace humility to learn along the way. It does not mean being sloe, but being immensely intentional.

→ To collaborate meaningfully, not symbolically. Collaboration begins with listening.

Because a solution that no one believes in, understands, or benefits from is not progress. It’s just noise dressed up as output.

#finnishdigiobsession

#leiskakone

#solutionbeforetheproblem

#dontbringmesolutionsbringmeproblems