“The sculpture already lies hidden within the marble, waiting. I need only to free it by chipping away the excess.”
—Michelangelo
The Renaissance master’s quote is a poetic—and somewhat idealized—metaphor for the act of sculpting. It gracefully omits the less glamorous details: the cramped hands, the marble dust clinging to the lungs, the fingers bruised by the chisel’s blows. Yet its essence is powerful: the work exists in potential, and art is the act of revealing it.
However, this subtractive philosophy—where perfection is achieved by removal—clashes starkly with the reality of digital design. Here, the process is not about uncovering a hidden form but building it layer by layer.
David Was Not an MVP (And Neither Is Software)
Michelangelo could remove the “excess” because his vision was singular: David was already there, defined by tradition and anatomy. But in app design, there is no preexisting block of marble. Every feature is a decision, not a discovery. For every implemented function, dozens are discarded—some due to prioritization, others due to constraints, many simply because of uncertainty. The final product is not a polished essence but a fragile balance between what’s included and what’s missing.
The Myth of the “Superfluous”
In marble, what is chipped away adds no value. In design, the “unimplemented” is rarely useless: it’s deferred ideas, future opportunities, even avoided mistakes. That “discarded material” doesn’t vanish—it piles up in roadmaps, backlogs, or the minds of designers. Unlike sculpture, software can grow—but it can also drown in technical debt or disjointed features.
True mastery lies not in chiseling toward an ideal form, but in deciding what deserves to exist—and accepting that design, unlike marble, is never final.
By: Nestor Casillo, ForAllTechNews Director
Image credit: Flickr / CC BY 2.0 / Attribution 2.0 Generic