Goodbye, Google An Article by Douglas Bowman stopdesign.com Without a person at (or near) the helm who thoroughly understands the principles and elements of Design, a company eventually runs out of reasons for design decisions. With every new design decision, critics cry foul. Without conviction, doubt creeps in. Instincts fail. “Is this the right move?” When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions. Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle. designdecisionsdata
The rational model of design Engineers seem to have a clear, if usually implicit, model of the process of design. It is usually an orderly model of an orderly process as the engineer conceives it. The notion that the design process should be modeled as a systematic step-by-step process seems to have first developed in the German mechanical engineering community. Herbert Simon independently argues for design as a search process in The Sciences of the Artificial. He was motivated to lay out a strictly rational model of design precisely because such a model was a necessary precursor to automating design. His model remains influential even if today we recognize the "wicked problem" of original design as one of the least promising candidates for AI. In software engineering, Winston Royce independently introduced a seven-step Waterfall Model to bring order to the process. In fact, Royce introduced his waterfall as a straw man that he then argued against, but many people have cited and followed the straw man rather than his more sophisticated models. Even if ironically, Royce's seven-step model must be considered one of the foundational statements of the Rational Model of Design. Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., The Design of Design Large combinatorial spacesThe ordering of steps