Lately Ive been thinking a lot about the contrast of expectations when comparing design and engineering practices, wondering how soon the two will completely diverge. Take for example the practice of refactoring code. Engineers more often than not expect this to be part of the process, and often relish the fact that they can return to some old code with a fresh perspective, to drastically simplify and improve it. Optimizing and iterating on something based on previous learnings or a new experience seems to be ingrained into how an engineer thinks. Comparing this to how many designers think today it shocks me how more of us dont embrace this kind of practice. I admit for myself that it can be a struggle, yet forcing oneself at any point to learn to let go of a problem or an argument, only with the knowledge that we can come back to it when a better solution presents itself, or get the spare time to really focus on a specific part that we are not satisfied with. We as designers take it upon ourselves to be the arbiters of a product experience and its level of taste yet unfortunately with this comes a stigma that a design that we have made is the final grand solution to any problem and that all parties involved should bow down to it or hit the road, lest they have any reservations. A great artist (apart from maybe an abstract impressionist) never sat down in a single sitting to paint something, dust off their hands and declare it a masterpiece. It took months, years, of form studies, life drawing and criticism for them to really develop a satisfying technique, and it should be no different for product designers. Rarely is anything good the first time around. If designers learn to understand this its likely the actual solution to a problem will present itself sooner.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 19:20:32 +0000
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