On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 08:59, Ali Naqvi<[email protected]> wrote: > Time and time again I am being told that a user centered design > development process isn't needed in our company since we do not make > consumer products.
This is an obvious strawman’s argument (one may call it even simply bullshit). Apart from ‘users’ not being equivalent to ‘consumers’: Your products are still used by *humans*. And even if they were just used by machines, they will most probably make contact with humans somewhere in the process chain. Whatever: complementing the engineering with a design process holds a potential to make the products more successful. Even more so if design is not understood as something applied to just products/objects but to a whole process, including e.g. service and other interfaces to your organisation’s customers. > A manager said last week: "We are a technology driven corporation > and that is why we are so successful". Which is actually a weak argument, with fallible hidden assumptions. Good technology and good design are NOT mutually exclusive. Quite in contrary: design is most often a catalyst for technology. And besides, said manager most probably has no comparative figures to support this statement as an argument against implementing more design in the development process. BTW: IMHO one should not get too much into measuring design success by economical figures, though – controllers already hold far too much power in many organisations, and executives with an accountant's instead of an entrepreneur's mindset will give you a hard time if something goes wrong on the market, even if it may not be design's fault. (This does certainly not imply that design could not be evaluated, mind you.) With all this said: given your email I'd guess that you might need much energy, patience, diplomacy(!), and a good strategy to overcome the obvious reluctance against implementing design in your organisation. (Hope I was reading your intentions correctly between the lines - if so: good luck!) Sascha -- & : create https://www.xing.com/profile/Sascha_Brossmann http://www.linkedin.com/in/brsma http://twitter.com/brsma ________________________________________________________________ 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
