[IxDA Discuss] design by committee??

[Peter Bagnall]

I've started describing this issue as "designer's don't come in boxes from the supermarket". It 
appeals to my warped sense of humour, but the point is there appears to be a belief in some 
quarters that if you have a "good methodology" and you get a "designer in a box" from the 
supermarket, get the designer to follow your methodology - hey presto, you'll get good 
design.

This is silly! Experience in the domain is important. For example, I'm working with older 
people, and have been for a few years. I've learnt a great deal about the specific issues that 
relate to deigning for older people and that experience means I can create better designs for 
them on my own. The idea of a designer being an ultimate generalist is crazy. It's like asking 
brain surgeon to do heart bypass! If I need a bypass I want a heart surgeon!

So my belief is that if you get a designer, designing in a domain in which they have a great 
deal of experience, you often can get great design just by leaving them to it. You will almost 
certainly want to to some testing to do a bit of polishing, and I still think that user research 
should be part of the process even for experienced designers, but design by committee and 
even sometimes by consensus won't be as good.

The rub here is that if you try to do this with a green designer its not going to work nearly as 
well. And as a designer, if you hop from domain to domain all the time, you're pretty much 
spending your whole life being green.

Cheers
--Pete

> [Please voluntarily trim replies to include only relevant quoted material.]
> 
> > The idea of the
> > lone genius designer developing a complete product design by
> > themselves is gone.
> 
> 
> Hardly. It happens every day in a lot of companies, and I'm a pretty big
> advocate of it, providing the designer is genuinely that good.
> 
> -r-
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