[thinking out loud...]
Again, it's worth noting that a great engineer does not necessarily make a great prototyper. "Correct" or "reusable" solutions are often not what we look for in quick throwaway code. For every problem, you should be able to come up with a large handful of solutions and be prepared to pick the one that gets the job done – fast. The end user will never see your great engineering, and they don't care.
Which is kinda like telling a designer that craft doesn't matter, you're just going to delete the presentation after you give it. So why stay up late tweaking it to make it look good? Just use a default powerpoint theme and be done with it. I mean, most of your audience isn't design-aware, they're not going to even notice that you picked a non-standard font and used a nice color pallete!
I would agree that in general engineers shouldn't be asked to prototype, however, I would also argue that there are many excellent engineers capable of prototyping. Thinking of people I've worked with over the years, many of my good prototyper coworkers were seen as bad engineers by other engineers and ended up leaving engineering at some point. Others learned to switch between "prototype" and "good code" and used the right one at the right time. In any case, having someone crank out a bunch of code knowing that someone else will rewrite all of it doesn't go over well with engineering and project managers.
My thinking is that design/marketing people need to have their own engineers, just like sales teams often have their own engineers. Call it "design support engineering" or something, and find engineers who are into cranking out demos and one-offs, not working their way up the engineering/architect/principal tree.
-- J. Eric "jet" Townsend, CMU Master of Tangible Interaction Design '09 design: www.allartburns.org; hacking: www.flatline.net; HF: KG6ZVQ PGP: 0xD0D8C2E8 AC9B 0A23 C61A 1B4A 27C5 F799 A681 3C11 D0D8 C2E8 ________________________________________________________________ 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
