Andrei, you did not respond to the one of the key points I was making in the original post. That the innovation comes from the interplay of form and function, that interplay plays out best if you have strong designers representing each perspective. One for function one for form.
No reasonable sized project has just one person on it doing all of the design and coding. You will have a team. With that the case, then you appear to be arguing for the Visionary Designer role. The single person who defines the entire design and then has folks do the details. Continuing with your analogy of Architects: you have a Frank Lloyd Wright with the vision and a team of folks behind the scenes doing the detailed designs of things so that they can be built. Of course, these folks are broken up into specializations. Some are good at the structure items required to build the building, others are good at the architectural details, plus all the third party contractors it takes etc... So the division of responsibility happens under the Visionary. What I am advocating is the team approach. One person is responsible for the functional design another is responsible for the form design. You dived this responsibility to create a creative tension. You set it up so these two sides have a tug of war with each other. If they have worked together a long time, then they will know how to push each other to be better. I call the person responsible for the functional design the Interaction Designer. I do not want to name the role of the person responsible for the form designer. As in past posts, the names for that role have caused issues. I do not care what they are called, just what they do; they design the form of the application. To be a good interaction designer, you need to gain the empathy of your users. You do this by doing actual research not by reading what someone else has done. You need to be able to communicate visually. You need to be able to validate your designs. A good designer for the form of the application needs all of these as well! So the difference is not in the skills it is in the roles they play to get the job done. The functional designer may never select final typography, but they better be able to call the form designer on bad selections. The form designer may never write detailed interaction specifications, but they better be able to point out a better way to do something if one exists. I believe I response to all of your points so I cut out the original message in an effort to keep the response short per forum guidelines. But here is the permelink to our reply if I missed something: http://www.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=23782#23784 Nick Iozzo Principal User Experience Architect tandemseven 847.452.7442 mobile [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.tandemseven.com/ ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
