[Sigia-l] You're not alone

[Ziya Oz]

Adrian Howard:

> These days we have a whole bunch of techniques  that mean we can make late
> design decisions with little cost. The  same isn't true of the construction
> world.

and then:

> Tell most architects or builders of large projects...that the design doesn't
> change during construction...

Hmm.

In either worlds, yes, some changes can be made at late stages but
fundamental changes cannot be. Very few buildings get torn down and
reconstructed to make such changes.

But, in the same vein, large scale projects, especially with many
dependencies, can't really be changed fundamentally at late stages either.
For example, Windows had no sound security architecture designed from the
beginning and couldn't be effectively "late-designed" for security for over
a decade, with the known results. Cellphones that rely on physical input
devices like keyboards cannot accommodate changing UX patterns for new
applications, except as kludges. Page-based designs are often different
enough from Ajaxy partial-update designs that they can't be "late-designed"
to transform smoothly. Applications that don't follow MVC are near
impossible to untangle their logic from UI components or data from stored
procedures. And so on.

Fundamental design, it turns out, is not fundamentally different in either
world. (There are post-mortems on the web, by those who were in charge of
efforts by various dotcom era companies that couldn't 'late-change' their
fundamental designs in the face of fast-changing market or technology
conditions and went under. The inability to change design wasn't "with
little cost," it was catastrophic.)

There are of course other approaches, best exemplified by a successful and
great architect such as Calatrava, who also happens to be an engineer. Or
even Ive at Apple whose team not only designs the full range of UX, but has
also keen interest and guidance in materials science, from how tightly
enclosures snap together, to how translucent densely colored plastics are,
to how softly indicator buttons glow. There are indeed many companies around
the world where architectural design and construction are housed under the
same roof. As there are companies that design and also build software.

Analogies are not perfect mappings of two different worlds, but convenient
conduits to better understand either or both. There are a lot of informing
similarities in this case.

----
Ziya

Design is how it works.