Designers versus Developers

At a South by Southwest talk, Jon Kolko, a designer and the author of a book dubbed "Exposing The Magic of Design," was one of many participants in a roundtable discussion on design at the Microsoft Studio (a building at 323 Congress where Microsoft seemed to set up shop for SXSW) where, truth be told, it might be more accurate to say he was the event's star. He seemed to be heavily driving the discussion and things said seemed to make their way back to him as prompts for him to react to or retort. He spoke considerably more than any one of the other players at the forum. In the picture I provide here he is not the guy with the microphone but the guy immediately next to him. A former coworker wanted to attend this talk and I stumbled in late to it to find him. I'm not sure of the exact title or the exact subject. The group vaguely spoke to the challenges of design. Things said included:

• We need a product. Designers need to solve a problem, not just feed developers who are sitting on their hands waiting for something to do.
• Designers approach problems from a very different angle than developers. A developer will try to solve a puzzle and ask himself/herself "How can I do it?" while a designer's first question is "Why?" Why tackle a given challenge? To get to the heart of the real problems one must ask the right questions.
• At, for example, Microsoft, you are a consumer, or you are a developer, or you are a designer, etc. Your story goes down a certain path of actions. You have a narrative. The story is the mission statement for design. There is always a narrative to consider in good design.
• Getting executives on board with "the feeling" can be challenging. Perhaps this is the core challenge for a designer.
• Jon thought that there are also challenges to getting engineers to embrace the touchy feely and said that he had trouble getting Microsoft's engineer culture to embrace good design. Another individual thought that developers are actually designers. He saw a craftsperson in every developer and said that when you are writing code you are being creative and spinning alchemy. Budget and time are often constraining engineers and keeping them from real work. Jon counter argued that there is an end game in design and that as a designer you are striving for something that has a larger humanitarian purpose.
• Software and drug narcotics are the only two spheres where we dehumanize people by labeling them as "users."
• Empathy is what it feels like to be another person. Empathy may be impossible to completely achieve, but an empathic approach will gain you a lot of good design decisions. Using a cool new tool, less so.
• Jon thought that it was alright to lose the designation of first to market. Take your time. He felt that a Lean approach is effective for telling you what not to build, but not what to build. For the later you need time.
• Kill your babies. Designers are taught this but developers do not receive comparable training in computer science. Another gentleman mentioned that he really only sees the packratting of old code in junior developers. He felt that most good developers would say of their work that "it's just code."
• What is art? ...is a silly question to answer, but Jon, while acknowledging this, nonetheless asserted that in making art you have to be OK with any possible outcome. Art is about asking questions and not solving problems. He did give that much of a minimal definition.
• If you do too much work for a company, everything you do will start looking like everything else the company has done.

Addendum 6/1/2014: In rereading this the second to last and first bullet points seem conflictory. Hmmm...