[karaterobot]

I have a subset of these printed out and tacked to a cork board in my office, and I refer to this website a few times a year. Very, very good stuff.

This one in particular was a big influence on me when I moved from engineering to design. It expressed what I'd felt but hadn't put into words. Not just the look, but nearly every aspect of a project is de facto path dependent, so you want to be as far upstream as possible. It's also why I volunteer to write a lot of documents I'm not strictly responsible for:

> 30. (von Tiesenhausen's Law of Engineering Design) If you want to have a maximum effect on the design of a new engineering system, learn to draw. Engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist's concept.

[monkeydreams]

> If you want to have a maximum effect on the design of a new engineering system, learn to draw. Engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist's concept.

This is a key truth that works in a number of contexts. If you want to make sure the new security policy won't break your workflows, offer to write the first draft. If you want to ensure the new automation system will work for your team's requirements - offer to chair the requirements meetings.

Humans are lazy, though some of them move around a lot in an attempt to mask this. If you get in early and set the parameters of an enterprise, you influence every iteration of that enterprise until its dying day.

[midoridensha]

> Engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist's concept.

This was illustrated in the movie "Galaxy Quest". The aliens saw the humans' TV show about space exploration, and designed a ship that exactly matched the fictional ship depicted. But they never saw a bathroom on the show, so they had to make up their own design...