On Design: The Woodpecker Pecks, but the Hole Does Not Appear

It’s hard to imagine how unremembered we all become,
How quickly all that we’ve done 
Is unremembered and unforgiven,
how quickly
Bog lilies and yellow clover flashlight our footfalls,
How quickly and finally the landscape subsumes us,
And everything that we are becomes what we are not.
— Charles Wright

I’ve always loved old barns, their sides gap-toothed with rot. Sometimes one corner’s collapsed, or masses of vines grip a wall as if they mean to pull its loft back to earth. I guess it’s something about the full-circle-ness that interests me. It’s a thing that a couple of humans made out of land stuff (wood and iron), finally being subsumed by the landscape. It’s terribly beautiful.

And I wonder if it’s hard for a barn builder to watch this happen. To see all that they built slowly become dirt. I know it’s hard for me, as a designer, to see the things that I helped build get dismantled, deprecated, and abandoned. And it happens all the time. I mostly design digital experiences where an application’s complete cellular overturn can be shockingly rapid. I lately realized that nothing I have designed has survived for more than five years. I get three years if I’m lucky.

All of that thought and research and synthesis. All of the prototyping, the testing, the iterating. The dying on hills, the not dying on hills. All of the meetings and all of the documentation. All of that caring for three, MAYBE five years of life. The woodpecker pecks, but the hole does not appear.

Maybe what bothers me about it is that it just doesn’t feel very full-circle. We skipped the broken windows and collapsed gable and went straight to the field of yellow clover. 



Where’s my beautiful, dilapidated barn?



I try to comfort myself by saying that castles made of sand... Even last week I consoled a colleague, saying, “if you think about it, we pull pixels out of thin air and all those bits are just dissolving back into thin air.” What a load of hooey. Carrion comfort. Really, all of this digital stuff is made of light and the light is either on, or it’s off. And it’s devastating when the lights go out.

“How quickly all that we’ve done / Is unremembered.” Wright gets it. After all our work, and all our toil, what are we left with? A giant, terrible, “So What?”  

“Hi, Abyss. Have you been working out?” 

So, everything’s terrible and nothing means anything. Same page. Only this time, I’m starting to think that maybe the abyss might not actually be so bad. I mean, sure, the gaping maw of meaninglessness holds our doom, but maybe it also holds possibility.

I’m thinking now that our quickened unremembering isn’t actually a journey into meaninglessness. Maybe it’s more kenotic than that, more an emptiness we can fill, a clearing rather than an abyss. Maybe it’s open ground to build on.

It’s kind of fitting that, as digital designers, it’s our lot to build monuments that are much less visible. And maybe they’re more potent for it. 

So, how do I know I’ve made an impact if the thing I built doesn’t last? Well, I’m not entirely sure yet, but I’m starting to ask myself a couple of good questions to gut check the impact of my work. I think of it as a rubric to make sure I’m not that damn woodpecker.

I'll start with the external, with the people I’m designing for.

Did I help someone make sense of their world? 

Did I help them understand their story? 

And did I help them tell it?

Did I make a little more space for them?

Did I boost their signal in all the noise?

Then I'll move to the internal, to the operational side, to the business end of things:

Did I set a foundation for someone else to build on?

Did I break down a barrier or lift someone over? 

Did I help someone grow? 

Did I help them heal?

Did I elevate the discipline? 

Did I elevate the brand?

Did I undo a system that needed to be undone?

And did I generate joy?

So that’s it. That’s my tether in the abyss, my beautiful, invisible barn, my woodpecker hole. I know it’s not much, but it’s something. And maybe it's enough. Maybe, as Wright says at the close of the poem, “this is all the world allows, and all that one could wish for.”

Wright, Charles. “The Woodpecker Pecks, but the Hole Does Not Appear.“ Scar Tissue, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2007.

Photo by Jeff Nissen on Unsplash