Designers, Developers And The Great Digital Divide
The movement of the WWW into greater interaction is having some unintended consequences and, surprisingly, revisiting some very old conflicts. Ultimately, these are right-brain/left-brain divides. FutureWare’s recent experience with these new/old issues has been, well, eye opening.
Like most companies that deal with the WWW, FutureWare is getting more involved in Web 3.0, so called, efforts. The 3.0 moniker has as many definitions as practitioners, but for our purposes it more or less means that Design is emphasized much more than it has been in the past for digital goods. Like Content during the early days of the WWW, Design is a broad catch-all for things that have, say, style and simplicity and youth and beauty and elegance and such. None of these attributes are definable in the classical sense of words with specific and concrete meanings, but more in an impressionist sense of, say, Rousseau or Cezanne, amazingly elastic and somehow self-evident, at least to the anointed.
All well and good, but we take a very prosaic view of web sites that are, after all, business tools, concerned with mundane matters related to attracting customers and generating revenue. Whatever Web 3.0 may be ultimately looks to us more like a very glossy magazine cover and equally glossy ads, with messages so profound that they escape immediate comprehension. I’m sure I lost one potential client who, when proudly asked what I thought of their newly designed, and highly acclaimed, web site, had to ask what they were trying to sell. They were having a backend database problem, which I could understand or at least comprehend, but glossy swirling cubes and such are not my ken. I very seldom scroll below the fold line, do try to explain things in twenty-five words or less, and always say I don’t know when I don’t.
But, this is something that FutureWare’s going to have to address and come to grips with as we get more involved with Flex and Flash and Papervision3D and AIR, with the intent of making products and services more attractive and intuitive to users, including their customers. We’re moving away from the flat and static nature of the WWW as it is now, and that forces are in motion that will make it more useful. Getting there may be a bit difficult, but it’s inevitable.
Wherein lays the divide. The new Design sensitivity requires a new skill, more attuned to looks and the ineffable than the predictability of logical processes that adhere to the Law Of The Excluded Middle. So far one noticeable aspect of this divide is that those who do the Design tend, very strongly, to be singular, while the developers tend to be teams that easily share common goals and world views, at least those dealing with technical matters.
Another noticeable aspect is the time it takes to do things. Developing, say, data access functionality is very linear but often comes in a complete package, usually drawing from an object library of prior art that has proven itself many times over. Design, on the other hand, is never complete, always needs adjusting to conform to criterion that never seems to be stated, much less demonstrable. One consequence of this is that end to end testing is never complete.
I once knew a brilliant analog hardware designer who could make anything, and I mean anything, out of acorns and apples. His designs were elegant and often breathtaking in their esthetic beauty. The problem was he could only make one of them, and we could never get into production to recoup development. Most of the Designers we’ve worked with so far have very similar traits.
Software development is much like writing a book: There’s no single right way, but there are a lot of wrong ways. Still, one plus one will always equal two, and software outputs products can be predicted a priori and tested, both initially and subsequently in recursions. Design doesn’t have this sense of self assurance and sufficiency.
This divide is probably as old as civilization itself. The conflicts between architect and builder, photographer and writer, writer and editor, creative spirits and organization imperatives, are inescapable and all around us today. This has been remarked on by many people, but for me the best was C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures, about the communications failure between the sciences and humanities, and which seems to be related to complexity, and perhaps a reflection of some cultural need for contrasts.
No doubt about it. As the Look and Design of tools, including software, becomes more important, the more difficult it will be to manage the efforts and resources needed to bring them to the market profitably. It promises to be interesting and not at all prosaic.
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Tags: design, development, digital divide, flex, papervision3d, Web 3.0