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by fredtruman 4913 days ago
The example about Google engineers "thinking like designers" is actually an example of "engineers thinking like engineers thinking about engineering a color choice" which the author is calling design. This is embarrassing. Engineers shouldn't think about design. Remember Douglas Bowman? http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

People want to use things - i.e. products, digital or otherwise - with style and performance. People, real people, don't give a rats ass about computer science or design - they just want the product to do something for them and they want to look cool doing it. With their expectations of performance aside for the moment, there is nothing cool about engineers "optimizing" style.

1 comments

“Engineers shouldn't think about design.”

In my experience engineers who think a little bit about design work better with designers than those who don’t.

In my experience, multi-disciplinary people of any kind work better than those who aren't. Such a rare and precious thing to understand the boundaries between fields and how connected they really are...
you're right, and vice versa... I was just a little excited there for a minute