004 Zaha Hadid

When the water stopped coming out of the taps in Kent last week, it was a useful reminder to everyone in the area of our basic needs. I want a glass of water very quickly became I need a glass of water.

Luckily the water came back after 3 days and all was good. Most design lives somewhere between these two states of want and need. One principle is that if it doesn't serve a function, if you don't actually need it, it shouldn't be in the design. Form follows function, apparently. But spend five minutes in a mid-century tower block and you'll discover that function without beauty is a fairly miserable thing. Design doesn't just serve practical utility. It can make us happier, calmer, occasionally even less depressed. The tap provides water. The beautiful tap makes you feel something about having it.

Great designers have the talent to challenge our needs. Zaha Hadid was rather good at this. Her buildings seem to arrive from a few years ahead, asking us to imagine how we might move, live and look at the world differently. You didn't necessarily need a Zaha Hadid building. That was rather the point.

In this article we explore what Zaha Hadid can teach us about challenging the status quo.

Zaha Hadid summarised her design philosophy with the inquiry "there are 360 degrees, so why stick to one?". She built her career on rejecting the 90-degree grid that conventional architecture had treated as a law of physics rather than what it actually was, a habit.

Her buildings don't have walls that stop and floors that start, they flow into each other. For years the technology to actually build what she drew didn't exist yet. She kept designing it anyway.Most Shopify stores default to the grid without ever questioning it because the template operates that way. Hadid's approach might teach us to start from the experience you want someone to have, and only then deciding which convention actually serves it.

Here are 5 Hadid ideas to help inform design thinking for your ecommerce store.

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Question the default before you use it

The right angle wasn't a rule, it was a habit nobody re-examined. Before defaulting to the standard grid, column count, or page structure your theme operates with, ask whether it's actually right for this product, or just easy and familiar.

Fluidity can be structural and not just decorative
Hadid's curves weren't ornament, they were how the building actually worked. A store's "flow" from homepage to product to cart should be designed as seemlessly as possible, where flow, story and interactivity all serve for a greater exerience.

Design one continuous journey, not isolated rooms

She built spaces to guide people through a continuous experience rather than a sequence of separate rooms. Think about the customer's path the same way. Each page should feel like the rhythm in a journey, not a fresh start every click.

Explore more directions before committing to one

"Why stick to one" was a working method, not just a slogan. She treated a single default direction as a failure of imagination. Before locking a layout or campaign, sketch a few genuinely different directions, not just variations on the first idea.

Design ahead of what's easy to build
Hadid kept drawing forms years before software or engineering could realise them, and pushed the tools to catch up rather than shrinking her ideas to fit them. Don't let "that's hard to build" be the first constraint on the idea. Because with development being quicker, we can do more. Start with the right experience, then find the way to build it.

Zaha Hadid was born in Baghdad in 1950, trained at London's Architectural Association, and in 2004 became the first woman to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize, spending four decades producing buildings that appeared to defy both convention and gravity.

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