A Companywide Awareness of Design


In most companies, designing the primary product or service is assumed to be a core competence. In the world of high-tech software-based products, it is assumed wrongly that product design is a core competence of the engineering staff. Actually, there are two parts to the act of creation: design and programming. It demands a significant cultural change to willingly allow interaction designers to work on the business's essential core alongside the engineers.

At any company, regardless of the business it is in, the employees know that they have certain obligations. For example, in a company that manufactures wire coils for loudspeakers, the production manager knows that, although her job is buying wire from the best and cheapest supplier, she cannot sign a supplier's contract until the company's legal counsel has reviewed it. The production manager doesn't know very much about contract legalities, but she knows that encumbering her company without first bringing in the professionals with specialized skills in the area of contract writing and negotiation is wrong. Even though she is not skilled with contracts or because of her lack of skill in this area she knows that the lawyers must be involved.

The receiving clerk at the freight dock despite being the most junior person on the staff knows that he is empowered only to sign for prearranged deliveries but that he cannot sign for anything else.

The founder and president of the coil-manufacturing company is also quite aware of the need for legal review at all levels. She isn't formally trained in law, either, and she consults with her counsel before signing any formal documents.

Even though none of these people, from the president down, is skilled in legal issues, they are all fully aware of the importance of legal review. Nobody in the company will make any commitments until the lawyers have had their say. There is a companywide awareness of the need for legal oversight and, when appropriate, intervention.

This companywide awareness is true in other areas as well.

When the coil-winding company needed a new manufacturing building, it hired an outside professional, an architect. Even though the production manager and the president were both well versed in the needs of the production floor, they knew that their understanding of the nuances of worker flow and building construction was sketchy. Nobody in the company would imagine expanding their physical plant without first consulting an architect. The architect translated the needs of the user into terms that could be understood by the builder.

The same is true for advertising. The marketing manager wouldn't think of asking a coil-winder to describe the benefits of the product for the company's brochure or for an acoustic-industry magazine. Everyone in the company, regardless of his or her sophistication, understands that advertising is the purview of professionals and that advertising experts must craft the company's public presence. Of course, those experts can be employees of the company or they can be hired from an outside advertising agency. Either way works just fine.

The analogy isn't perfect because neither architecture nor legal advice is a core competence of a product company. Programming, however, is the creation of a product, and that is typically assumed to be a core competence. Given the direct effect on the business, you would expect any company to be even more circumspect about turning the reins over to the wrong people than with advertising, architecture, or purchasing.

We have to build awareness across the entire company that interaction design is a realm that requires professional skills and that interactive products cannot be just engineered, but must also be designed in order to succeed in the open market.



Inmates Are Running the Asylum, The. Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy &How to Restore the Sanity - 2004 publication
ISBN: B0036HJY9M
EAN: N/A
Year: 2003
Pages: 170

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