Comments on: design mind / developer mind

By: Bri

Bri — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:55:15 +0000

@ Tom – Aesthetics are the most challenging thing to me as well. Much of design is actually pretty logical – making things readable, grouping, layout, creating sensible responses to actions… But aesthetics is the emotional part of design, and that’s the part I’m not as good at. Color, in particular, is something that I have a difficult time figuring out.

And just to clarify, I’m not saying that my own managers and coworkers don’t get it, just that it’s possible for that to happen.

By: Bri

Bri — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:48:28 +0000

I guess maybe it runs in the family.

By: BJL

BJL — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 22:43:46 +0000

This reminded me of a situation at a company where I worked. There were numerous ingredients that had to flow from silos into hoppers and onto a conveyor system. The hoppers shook to keep the ingredients from caking/clogging so there were canvas sleeves connecting the mechanics of the hopper to the feeders for the line. But nothing was in alignment and each piece of equipment had different sized openings. What a mess. The supply room had stacks and stacks of canvas sleeves that fit, didn’t fit, didn’t know if they fit, we’ll make it fit. There were some engineering drawings of the equipment but no vendor could seem to make the canvas correctly so a job order was sent to engineering to remedy the problem. I happened to overhear my boss talking about the situation and had the idea that if we drew full-sized patterns that the canvas shop could cut out and use, just as I do to make a dress at home, quality control should be more uniform. So I set about making patterns for each connection and meeting with a canvas shop to explain how to use the patterns. Problem solved.
I have strived to be some what of a “Renaissance Woman” and learn as much as I can about as much as I can so I may have some insight where another may not. So I think I may be a “Designeveloper” too. I just didn’t know what to call myself.

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:29:40 +0000

For some reason, the whole time I was reading this; I couldn’t help but think of the design mind being Kirk and the developer mind being Spock: Sitting together on a bridge in your head, arguing about how to solve various problems. Kirk (designer) teaching Spock (developer) that emotions (a holistic view of a well organized system) are an important part of decision making (development) and Spock teaching Kirk to not let his emotions (holistic view) cloud his judgments (low level designs, IA and feasibility). In a lot of ways, if you get them talking to each other a lot (I guess by having a well oiled corpus callosum?) then can achieve much more than the sum of their parts.

Also, if you understand both, despite not being “gotten” by your managers and possibly co-workers, it probably helps tremendously to be able to understand why and where there are communication failures between developers and designers.

Now if only I could figure out anything about aesthetics aside from “Hey, that looks nice to me. Why? No idea!”