[Sigia-l] Web Developers

[Alexander Johannesen]

On 2/7/06, Listera <listera at rcn.com> wrote:
> Now that we've run the course on this little experiment, you seemed to have
> caught on to the absurdity of dissecting Design, a holistic discipline, into
> myriad disjointed fiefdoms of titles and deliverables.

But in reality, these things do exist, whether they might be good or
bad. It is not absurd to do loose separation; we humans are quite good
at it, and do it all the time. Some abstractions are good and work
fine, others are crazy and doesn't work. It isn't a problem of *doing*
it, but more to how it is done. Ideas, thoughts, communication skills,
etc.

Not sure why splitting "design" into various bits is a controversy;
Sometimes they're good and sometimes they're bad. Just like you're
railing against cutting "Design" into bits, you're doing the opposite
and saying there are no (or should not be any) bits. They are two
extremes, and neither is right. Of course there are bits, big, small,
abstract, concrete, dismayel, silly, good, strong, weak ... It's not
about the bits; it is about communication between the curators of the
bits, and if that's in place, it doesn't matter even if you're doing
top-down communication and meddling in a waterfall methodology using
the latest best-practices.

I mean, c'mon, folks; this is all about categorisation, something
people on this list knows bucketloads about. We know about tags, why
they got introduced, and how they work for some things, but not for
all. We know why controlled vocabularies work for some things, but not
for others. We know when to do a card-sort and when to stay right
clear of it. We know all these things, and we know that categories,
job descriptions and the various aspects of design *needs* to be
separated into various bits (because it is an automatic thing we
humans do; you cannot escape it), we know that this is something that
we humans do without thinking, we're darn bloody good at it, and we
also know that we're darn good at seeing synergy at the seams (apart
from the anal retentive, and *those* people are the only problem I see
here), that a car mechanic probably could fix a bike, that an IA
probably knows about UCD, that big-D design is *yet* another diffuse
abstraction and multiple steps away from someone putting item X into
machine Y to produce Z. It's *language*. It's flowing. Just like our
culture, our sector, our work, our passions, and our lives.

> That, incidentally, happens to be the focus of most of my rants on this
> list.

So what you're saying is that the world has to change to stop you? :)
I think we understand that deliverables puts constraints on a job, and
that sometimes those constraints are bad in the name of good design.
But sometimes they're darn good, too. It's never black and white, and
anyone claiming otherwise is bordering on religion. :)


Alex
--
"Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know."
                                                         - Frank Herbert
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