In 2023, I did something deeply awkward at a workshop: I spent three minutes earnestly pitching a product I thought was completely useless.

It was a workshop on product pitching and storytelling. The professor pulled up a product website and asked us to practice what we'd just learned — a three-minute sales pitch. I looked through the site carefully. The features, the use cases, the target users. Then I raised my hand.

"Professor, I can't pitch this product. I don't see how it helps anyone. The use cases described here would never happen in real life."

He looked a little uncomfortable. He assured me that this was just an exercise — the point was to practice presentation skills, not to evaluate the product itself. I nodded, a bit unconvinced, and let it go.

Then I got up and spent three painful minutes pitching it anyway.

I was honestly pretty shaken. This was a high-profile project at the time — the website was so polished it made my student portfolio look like crayon drawings, and it had serious investment, media buzz, and was reportedly close to production. Who was I, a design student still in school, to question something validated by capital markets, industry professionals, and countless people far more experienced than me? Surely they couldn't all be wrong — and I couldn't be the only one who was right?

I left the classroom with that question still sitting in my chest.

Two years later, I got my answer.

In 2025, the company announced it was canceling the product entirely and selling off its remaining assets. All the marketing, all the celebrity endorsements — none of it had translated into real cash flow.

The product was the Humane AI Pin.

When I saw the news, I felt a strange sense of relief. Not the satisfaction of "I told you so," but something quieter — my confusion back then was valid. It wasn't that I failed to see the product's value. It was that the value wasn't really there.

The beautiful renders and animations weren't the problem — they were genuinely impressive, and they gave the product real aesthetic appeal. (They probably worked pretty well on investors, too.) But aesthetics can't answer a more fundamental question: why should this product exist?

A few questions have been turning over in my mind ever since —

Who came up with the original concept? What was the basis for the conviction that this would find a market? Was the research data genuinely exploratory, or was it selectively gathered to support a conclusion that had already been reached? Were those personas built from real users, or reverse-engineered to make the product seem more justified?

This kind of "conclusion first, evidence later" research is surprisingly common in the design industry. You've probably seen it — a beautifully formatted user journey map, crisp insights, everything looking airtight on the surface, yet somehow feeling hollow. Because it wasn't discovered. It was constructed. Built for the boss, built for the investors, and sometimes built for yourself (because otherwise how would I ever finish my assignments?!).

When this happens in school, it's mostly harmless. I eventually got better at managing my time and running more rigorous research — building honest design concepts became less of a scramble. But in professional settings, the problem gets a lot more complicated. Because even when someone senses that the direction is wrong, the real question is: do they feel safe saying so?

In conversations with friends across different workplaces, I keep hearing the same story: a manager proposes an idea, and the researcher's job becomes proving that it's correct. Nobody is going to walk into their boss's office and say "I think your judgment is off" — that's not a question of courage, it's a question of professional survival. So data gets filtered. Insights get packaged. The final report is one that makes everyone happy, while drifting further and further from the truth. And if the decision eventually fails? The accountability rarely lands on the person who made the call. After all, the research process was followed. If no one flagged the problem, that's on the researcher — what could the manager possibly have done wrong?

Maybe that's how the Humane AI Pin made it all the way to production. I genuinely don't know, and I'm not in any position to judge the individuals on that team — they had their own pressures and constraints.

But the whole thing keeps bringing me back to something a professor at SCAD once said: a perfect render can't save a bad design.

The real value of design and research lies in genuinely getting close to users and honestly uncovering problems. That requires designers to resist the pull of the beautiful render and sketches and sit longer in the messy, unglamorous phase of research and concept definition. And it requires organizations to build an environment where someone can actually say, "I think we're heading in the wrong direction" — and be heard.

Both things matter. And neither, it turns out, is easy to come by.