In my web wanderings this weekend, I found a session at the recent IxDA 08 Conference that I thought was quite interesting. It's the keynote address by Alan Cooper called An Insurgency of Quality.
One of the big ideas is that he compares programmers to pre-industrial craftsman, whose primary concern is the quality of the product they are producing....think "old world craftsmanship". However, most businesses are still in a post-industrial mindset, where the goal is to decrease the cost of production while increasing the amount you can produce...think...assembly line manufacturing - good enough quality at a reasonable price. (Compare a hand-made guitar to a factory-produced one and let me know which you'd rather have.)
If you follow this logic far enough, then you really want to separate out the craft (the coding) from the designing. You want to design first, which tells you what the product will do, followed by design engineering, which tells you how it will do it. These first 2 steps are iterative and collaborative in nature. The last step is about efficiency - that's where you do the "real programming".
Link: An Insurgency of Quality (41min)
Check it out and let me know what you think. I thought it was insightful and somewhat radical.
Chris Reckling
Program Director, UX MA Design Studio, Lotus Software
Chris Reckling | 21 March 2008 09:00:00 AM ET | Westford, MA | Comments (0)
