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I am convinced that one of the hardest jobs around, if not the hardest, is quality control. And though after the fact quality control is complicated and necessary, I am talking about preemptive and preventive quality control, the type that gets things right the first time and does that consistently (jidoka). But if there is an area that has taken a lot of beating in the last 20 years it is quality control, because of many different constructs like speed to market, design for obsolescence, lean & agile, to name a few. If designers are seen many times as people that ask too many questions and slow down the process, making it more expensive, then our colleagues from quality control get an equal if not worse rap. Probably not surprising that in some areas the average product lifespan has dropped over 30% in two decades, and product recalls in the U.S. increased by 33% from 2012 to 2022 across all industries. One of the things that sort of happened to design and quality control is the notion that everyone owns both, and as we know, when everyone owns something, no one really does.
This type of preemptive and preventive quality control requires a certain mindset, learned behavior, experience. I wouldn’t say we are born with it, though I am sure there are traits that end up benefitting those that are good at doing this, many times these folks are seen as a pain in the a*** because they do three things that make a lot of people uncomfortable, they ask a lot of questions, they go into a lot of detail and minutia, and they do a lot of “what if” scenarios. You can easily see how this starts showing up very early, probably before kids are 7 years old when apparently our personality is shaped, and some folks are just better at it, even if they don’t take on the career of quality control. If you are a woman, this might resonate even, not sure about your experience but I find women much more prone to asking questions, going into detail and think about all sorts of scenarios. I don’t want to make this topic about gender, but there might be something there.
This quality control, the one that might not be done by consulting a manual and following a checklist to see if things are as they were designed to be, the kind that simply identifies possibilities, impacts, repercussions before and while you are doing things, the kind that many times is representative of doing that same thing over and over, but may not necessarily be so since this type of quality control has transfer abilities – means you never did this, but you did that, and that, and it informed you to make the right decisions. This is rare, valuable, notable, and I think goes beyond all the millions of how-to-do videos and manuals GPTs have gobbled from YouTube and company sites, it is experiential, it is context driven, and it is unique.
Why am I rambling? The deck we built could be better. Both aesthetically (there are some extra holes that I hope no one notices…) and structurally (the way we attached the posts to the structure is creative, but may not be 100% by the code…), to the majority of people I believe this deck will look fantastic, there are a few that will say the deck is a great job under the circumstances (meaning how fast we proposed ourselves to build it, we didn’t have enough grooved IPE and had to improvise with the straight edge, etc.), and some will do the job of the after the fact quality control and identify things that could be better. Chances are they will not identify the ones I am stating here, and in some cases might be things that fall in the realm of preference (eg.: we did a single frame with long boards). Reality is, I stand by the work done, and I am very happy with the result, I love the time I spent working with my brother-in-law, learning while doing. And based on what I have seen done by others around the house, some of them specialized and experienced contractors, their work is also not immune to this type of assessment. So, I wonder if this is me, my constant pursue for quality though I am the first one saying not to design perfect solutions for imperfect people. The saddest thing is that people cannot appreciate what was never done, so there will always be a slightly different deck… in my mind!
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