“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions […] Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Rilke offers these words to the young poet Franz Kappus. I want to read them more broadly – as a call for sensitivity to everything that remains unclear and unfinished. Today, in an age of sterile perfection and algorithmic calculations, this call rings especially true.

Contemporary design, especially user-centric design, resembles a well-oiled machine: efficient, precise, business-driven. It’s a response to questions that often never even fully form. Every line and every color are chosen in the name of maximized outcomes – higher conversion rates, smoother UX, more user-friendly interfaces.

It's not that these goals should be dismissed. Design must be functional, practical, and effective. It must fulfill its purpose. But in this relentless pursuit of functionality, have we lost something inherently human? As designers, in our endless chase for perfection, have we forgotten that imperfection – the smudged lines, the accidental decisions, the traces of error – is what gives something character, tells a story?

Perfection – or rather, the constant striving for it – is no longer the exception, but the norm. Interfaces work flawlessly, and services are intuitive to their limits. The world of design has gained in ergonomics, but it has lost something along the way. Perfection, though captivating in its seamless elegance, strips things of their tension. It removes everything that is unpredictable, everything that allows things to "live."

For many, this will sound like heresy, but perfect design feels, to me, somehow emptied. The value of imperfection lies in its resistance to being fully controlled, in its ability to provoke emotion – sometimes discomfort, sometimes awe. That’s why projects filled with human flaws – imperfect, even “wrong” – can be so magnetic.

In an age when artificial intelligence creates images, music, and designs in ways that seem increasingly indistinguishable from human work, imperfection becomes a value in itself. It’s paradoxical, but in the age of synthetic perfection, it’s the errors and the imperfections that start to draw attention. Just like vinyl in the world of music streaming, imperfection in design becomes a manifesto of authenticity. A manifesto of pure being, not calculation. It’s everything available to the few, those who are “free to drift.”

I enjoy spending time in places that seem to have emerged by accident, growing through years of accumulated “localness.” Places with layers, history, identity. Spaces that repel and attract at the same time – or maybe it’s the other way around – milk bars, small-town shops, strange spaces straddling the line between ugliness and charm. Olga Drenda, in her book Wyroby, captures this phenomenon perfectly, describing how homegrown spaces – chaotic, improvised, sometimes even caricatured – become places of unexpected magic. It’s not just about aesthetics; it’s sociology too. These spaces tell us more than the most meticulously designed showrooms.

This tension between inconsistency and authenticity is so inspiring. It’s not about fetishizing “ugliness,” but about being open to what is uncomfortable and ambiguous. Imperfection holds a freshness that’s hard to find in the world of sterile solutions. It’s fascinating to explore these structures of imperfection, full of gaps and undefined edges.
Similarly, in Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi finds beauty in imperfection and transience. In the technique of kintsugi – repairing ceramics with gold – cracks become the focal point of the object, its unique history. It is through this worldview that imperfection begins to function as a story.

I am aware that attempting to transfer a similar philosophy to design or graphic design is walking a fine line. It’s a thought that, as I grow older, returns more often – initially as a vague hallucination, today as a companion: Imperfection is not merely a mistake – it can be a conscious gesture of the designer who creates an object not as a “product,” but as a narrative. It’s an element that stands out and engages, while reminding us that behind the design stands a human, not an algorithm. In this archetype, design is not about the product, it’s about the human.

Jakub Szczęsny, in Witaj w świecie bez architektów, shines a light on the value born from the chaos of grassroots initiatives. Spaces that emerge spontaneously, without imposed top-down visions or rigid aesthetic guidelines, paradoxically end up being closer to everyday life than the works of the most renowned architectural firms. They are imperfect, heterogeneous, sometimes even on the edge of functionality, but it’s in this improvisation that their true power lies – they respond to the needs of users with a kind of intimate precision that no global project could offer. All the more reason to understand them.

Could visual design, which is closer to my heart, follow the same path? Or perhaps create its own understanding of it? Instead of obsessively striving for consistency and submitting to increasingly automated processes, we could allow ourselves more flexibility, a conscious openness to chaos and chance. In design, there is still the pervasive belief that the designer holds the monopoly on knowledge and understanding. But sometimes, more meaning and depth arise where the designer steps back and allows the space – or the object – to speak for itself.

Rilke urges us to love the questions, to live in their uncertainty. Can design once again become a space for such questions? Today, design obsessively seeks answers – quick, functional, measurable. But perhaps sometimes it’s worth letting go. Let things not be perfect. Ask, and ask again.

Imperfection doesn’t have to mean chaos – it can be a humanist gesture, a reminder that design is not just a tool. It is also a space for art, for dialogue, for emotion. Perfection is banal; imperfection provokes thought. In a world of withered perfectionism, imperfection is an act of courage. It is a gesture of defiance against the algorithmic order where every decision is justified by market research and test results.

It’s not about sabotaging functionality. But design that rejects emotion and individuality in the name of efficiency becomes cold and dehumanized. And however pathetically it may sound... A truly great design is more than just a solution – it’s an act of faith in humanity and its ability to navigate a world full of tensions and uncertainties. In a world of weaving narratives.
Design doesn’t have to be perfect. It must be authentic. And within that authenticity lies its true power.