The Case for Squishy Things
Why hard-to-pin-down projects are worth embracing
I feel at home with squishy things.
I’m both accustomed to and fascinated by the squishy; things that easily change shape and are hard to pin down. Play-doh, pudding, most marketing projects... my 6-month old son.
I first heard a colleague use the word “squishy” to describe the status of a project that lacked an obvious next step. After presenting an early round of positioning concepts, the client’s feedback was something akin to “What if we did all of these, but also none of them?” We sat in a small conference room, staring at a whiteboard wall plastered with ideas, wanting to grab the project by the horns, but discovering the horns are made of Jell-O and can’t be grabbed so much as delicately carried to a safer location.
Squishy seemed like the perfect word. Squishiness is where questions are answered with “I don’t know but let’s figure it out.” For some teams, squishiness can feel like finding food on the floor; inherently both a mistake and a warning sign of something worse if not eliminated.
To me, it’s the good stuff. Squishy projects are where I tend to feel most at home. Because that’s where real creativity happens. That’s where exploration can lead to actual unexpected places. Squishiness is chasing an idea stuck between two stages of evolution that feels vague, ethereal and intangible. It’s sitting in a room with your team translating cryptic client feedback into the material world. It’s knowing you have an idea but struggling to put it to words, so you start doing this:
Of course, on paper we all want a clear picture of what success looks like. But like toy designer Cas Holman likes to say, easy is boring. Squishy is where you find unlikely inspiration. Playing with squish is the only way to make something, eventually, less squishy. How intangibles might become tangible. Investigating and interrogating the squishy parts of a project is how we get detective movie moments, rejoicing in truth that’s been there THIS WHOLE TIME.
Like I said: the good stuff.
I’ve had former colleagues chide me for both calling things squishy and for getting so enthusiastic about them that I knock over a nearby glass of water. I think moments that feel squishy are worth embracing, no matter how hard it might be to get them to hold still.
Do you agree? Pro-squish? Anti-squish?