“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” You’ve heard it. We’ve all heard it. It’s usually rolled out as a rallying cry for bold thinking. A justification for moving fast, trusting instinct, and not getting bogged down in research. To be fair, there’s truth in it.
People rarely describe the solution. That’s not their role. But dismissing them because they can’t imagine a car instead of a horse misses the real point entirely.
Innovation doesn’t come from asking people to design the answer. It comes from understanding why they need one.
When someone says they want a “faster horse”, what they’re really saying is:
They are describing pain, not prescribing a product.
The car wasn’t a rejection of the horse owner’s voice. It was a deeper response.
At Studio Mint, this distinction matters. Our clients don’t come to us saying, “We need a brand pyramid and a refined positioning model.” They come saying:
They’re not asking for a logo. They’re asking for clarity.
They’re not asking for a website. They’re asking for momentum.
Our job is to interpret the friction beneath the request.
There’s a tendency in our industry to swing between two extremes.
One side treats research like a ritual. Workshops, surveys, stakeholder interviews — tick the box and move on.
The other side waves the Ford quote around as permission to skip empathy entirely. “Trust the vision. Users don’t know what they want.”
Both are flawed.
Insight is not a magic bullet. It won’t hand you a breakthrough on a silver platter. But it is a powerful lens. It tells you where the tension lives. And tension is where the best ideas are born.
Some of the strongest brand platforms we’ve developed have come from holding three things in productive conflict:
When those forces collide, something interesting happens.
That’s where the car appears. Not because we ignored the horse. But because we understood the journey.
Let’s not pretend imagination isn’t essential. It is.
Emerging technology. Cultural shifts. New platforms. AI. Behavioural change. These are not user-generated requests. They’re possibility spaces.
As a studio, we continually explore them. We test. We experiment. We integrate new tools into our workflow. But even then, the designer’s eye still leads. The strategist’s judgement still shapes the outcome. Technology accelerates; it doesn’t replace discernment.
The mistake is assuming insight and imagination compete.
They don’t.
Insight grounds the idea.
Imagination stretches it.
Without insight, you build something clever but disconnected.
Without imagination, you build something accurate but unremarkable.
The problem with the “faster horses” line isn’t that it’s entirely wrong. It’s that it shuts down conversation.
It implies users are clueless. That listening is optional. That empathy is a soft extra.
In reality, people are often our richest source of inspiration. Not because they articulate the final form of the solution, but because they reveal the behaviours, habits and constraints shaping their world.
If we want to create work that actually moves the needle — brands that resonate, websites that convert, campaigns that land — we cannot design in isolation.
At Studio Mint, we don’t ask, “What do you want us to make?”
We ask:
That’s where the real brief lives.
The future isn’t built by ignoring people. It’s built by understanding them deeply enough to go beyond their initial ask.
The horse matters.
The journey matters more.
And sometimes the answer is evolutionary.
Sometimes it’s transformative.
But it always starts with listening.
