In 1957, Pablo Picasso analyzed and explored his interpretation of Diego Velázquez’s highly influential 1656 painting, Las Meninas. As part of his series of explorations, Picasso wanted to stay true to his own style, while also retaining the authenticity of the experience Velázquez created for the viewer. He was so committed to analyzing Velázquez’s inspiring masterpiece from the Spanish Golden Age of art, that he undertook 57 explorations before creating his final 6 feet by 9 feet masterpiece that is now known as Picasso’s version of Las Meninas and can be experienced at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona.
Picasso explored various ways to interpret each aspect of the original Las Meninas from lighting, to perspective, even to each of the characters in the painting. Picasso also played with a variety of interpretations of how he would approach Velásquez’s work and ultimately decided to stay true to the spirit of it in terms of lighting and perspective, but made it contextual to his style — analytical cubism. This is particularly evident in his explorations of Infanta Margarita, the focal character of Velázquez’s Las Meninas, where Picasso’s interpretation of Infanta Margarita’s complex thoughts are represented on her face in his version of the painting.
Picasso’s meticulous process of exploration and his final piece for Las Meninas, which draws heavily from Velázquez’s version but retains the raw complexities and stylistic endeavors of analytical cubism, should sound familiar to product designers. It is very much analogous to how we approach our own work.
Problems are approached from various angles, rules and conventions are broken if it makes sense to do so in context to what we’re solving, and we’re often inspired by other analogous approaches — yet we create solutions contextual to our needs and the use-case at hand. Picasso explored each character to see how it fits into his bigger (figurative and literal) picture. As product designers, we often explore each feature individually but ultimately, each component and solution must fit together on a system design level and it must fit into the bigger vision of the products we work on for our efforts to be successful.
For artists, most viewers are only ever exposed to the final masterpiece without nary a whisper of the thinking and process behind it. It is the final piece that is often critiqued and consumed by the masses. Similarly, for product designers, most of our users are only exposed to what they use.
What ultimately gets shipped is what’s often critiqued by users without consideration to the intentionality of the design decisions — and it makes it that much more important for us to consider each piece of our design and product strategy within the context of the entire system and vision for the product.
The inspiration for writing this post came from a trip I took a few weeks ago to Barcelona. The Picasso Museum in Barcelona houses the entire 58 painting series of Las Meninas by Picasso. It is the only complete series by Picasso that can be experienced together, and I highly encourage you to view it if you find yourself in Barcelona (and also do the audio tour as it’ll give you context to each of his pieces).
