[Sigia-l] Re: first principals (bias in cataloging & classification)

[Eric Scheid]

On 12/3/03 11:26 AM, "Peter Merholz" <peterme at peterme.com> wrote:

> But I do question the value of presenting the multiple designs to clients.

You might also want to question the motives of doing so.

I've sat in on more than a few of these "show the designs to the client"
meetings, and as a disinterested outsider who shares the same headspace as
these "outsourced service professionals that depend on clients say so" ...
these meetings are not necessarily designed to facilitate/fine-tune the
design. They are often/sometimes simply dog-and-pony shows to demonstrate
progress, to prove they've been doing more than sipping lattes and playing
foosball on the client's dime, and to give the man with the cheque book a
sense of control. 

Sometimes it's a slide show of discarded designs leading to the final,
sometime it's the same design dressed up in three different colours. Only
once did I see the designers bring one good design and two bad ones to the
client, and even though they'd biased things as much as they could to
persuade the client to make the "right" choice the client still bollocksed
it up. Those designers were kicking themselves afterwards.

Caveat: this *is* admittedly a gross generalisation of a subset of such
meetings.

e.