A man is helping an elderly gentleman who doesn’t know whether the bus that’s arriving is his. “This is the H6,” he tells him calmly. The older man replies with a hesitant “Oh, really?” The first man confirms it with a short, blunt “yes.” The older man gets on behind me, and now I hear him sit down a few seats further back. There’s no miracle in this scene: just a small gesture of trust, significant enough that someone might end up, by mistake, in the underworlds of the city.

Why has this scene stayed with me? Often, in the studio, everything revolves around that fragile instant when uncertainty turns into decision. When I present a project, some clients look at me the same way that elderly man looked at the bus: with the intuition that perhaps the proposal is the right one, but without any guarantee. They have to take a step I don’t know whether to call courage or faith: to trust in a direction that, because it’s new, they don’t yet recognize, and to bet on an intuition when the evidence simply doesn’t exist.

This week it happened again with an apparently insignificant commission: some icons for a website. A tiny fragment of a much more ambitious project, yet decisive enough to completely change its atmosphere. I suggested creating them with Olga Capdevila, who has the gift of turning a detail into a small event. We stepped away from the usual neutrality and created icons that not only identified, but transformed the environment with a strikingly innovative visual approach.

At first, the client couldn’t find their place. What they were seeing fell outside their frame of reference. But time has a curious way of reorganizing our gaze: the initial strangeness gradually unraveled until what once felt unsettling began to make sense. Strangeness turned into familiarity, and familiarity into trust. Eventually, they approved them, assuming the risk they might entail.

Because it’s natural —as Simone Weil said— risk is part of our deepest structure. We need security, yes, but also what challenges us. If everything were predictable, we’d end up suffocating. Only in that narrow strip of uncertainty can what is truly new appear.

And I think perhaps that’s exactly where we work: in that space between what we know and what cannot yet be proven. In that dance where someone proposes an unknown direction and someone else agrees to be led. In that humble wager that allows an idea, a gesture, or a new way of seeing to have, someday, the possibility of becoming certain.

Warmly from the H6 bus,
Ingrid