Saturday, March 20, 2010

What's in a name.

Bill Buxton at his Mix10 session brought up a point that I've had a rant or two about for many years: Just because you can count your change when buying something doesn't make you a Mathematician.

Equally, just because you do some creative things as part of your work does not make you a Designer.

We all know that you can't build 'battleship grey' applications any more, those days have gone and I see many sessions in conferences and user groups about Developer / Designer interaction.

I think we haven't got the right words for this and it makes for more confusion.

In the Agile development world we all know the benefits of Ubiquitous Language - we all have to have a common understanding of the terminology or chaos prevails.

Let's start calling the people who work in Illustrator, Photoshop and Blend 'Visual Stylists' - they do very creative stuff but they are not Designers, any more than the equally creative programmers with which they have to interface.

Design is a fundamentally different process from the implementation of styles or code. We should reflect that in the language we use.

Dave Evans
'Design Engineer'

BTW I disagree with Bill's analogy where he had writing code and applying style as Construction, in software Construction is the Build process. The code and styles are the blueprints. And that's why software is fundamentally different to all the other disciplines.