[To Be Designed]

About the Title

Almost a year ago now, I read a great article in Fast Company magazine. It was about design and meaning -- something I've been interested in ever since one of my college art professors handed me a copy of Ben Shahn's The Shape of Content. You can read the article here, but a key idea -- and I can't tell you how relieved I was to see that the business world is finally getting it -- is that design is meaning. Design permeates everything.

Strangely, in the world of software development, there is a rebellion against this idea, and I'm reasonably sure it stems from its computer science heritage. For some reason, science has always positioned itself as being somehow contrary to the world of aesthetics. Scientists don't design, they analyze. But analysis, if it has any worth beyond the simple establishment of a point of knowledge, is always part of a larger process of design. We analyze in order to gather knowledge that enables us to gain understanding. We are always seeking either to understand a design or to create one.

Many programmers reject the notion that they are designers, but the truth of the matter is that they design whether they acknowledge it or not. They may have designed software as they were coding it, but in the end the design is there in the product whether or not its creation was intentional. All I'll say about that for now is that they would do well to start making the design intentional.

Both the world of business and the world of software development are maturing to the point (finally) of beginning to acknowledge that the ability to perform intentional design is a critical success factor. Everything that is "To Be Done" is really "To Be Designed." And that thought process that we call design is always the underlying determiner of success -- whether we like it or not.

posted by BailWatch Author @ 11:05 AM