The Gulf Between Design and Engineering

I couldn't agree more with Rune Madsen's article on the gulf between design and engineering in some organizations.

I believe the way most organizations produce digital products is fundamentally broken. The elephant in the room is a dated understanding of the role of both design and engineering, which in turn shapes how organizations hire, manage, and produce digital things. These companies invest billions of dollars building teams, processes, and tools on top of an immature discipline and an outdated waterfall model that ends up being detrimental to productivity, team happiness, and ultimately, the resulting experiences we bring to life.

I work at a company which is a nestled set of orgs within orgs. A sibling design department to mine has recently finalized their waterfall process with a very detailed document. It's really well done, and a big achievement for our Design Ops. I'm reading it, though, and realizing that it could not possibly work for my department without introducing bottlenecks from design and slowing down the rate with which we ship. That documentation clearly solves an org problem, albeit one out of my view — I suspect a political one concerned with executive reporting. That's fair. There are many acceptable reasons for leadership to prioritize what they choose. In a big org like the one I'm in, accountability can take precedence over product. Again, fair.

My team — as opposed to the others — operates as Madsen describes: integrated with engineering. Every week, we're shipping new features across multiple Publishing tools. And at various levels. Sometimes the feature is a new button in the UI for a new function. Sometimes the feature is a systems-wide capability which cuts multiple steps out of a newsroom workflow. The high speed with which we work depends on the tight partnership between design and engineering. Because of this, possible ship-sinking icebergs in the engineering phase can be avoided by steering design in the right direction from the very beginning. We move smoothly and quickly from concept to launch.

It's very worth reading Madsen's entire article. I started to clip quotes from it and couldn't stop. What I'm going to continue thinking about is the various reasons an org may choose to operate differently. What are the orthogonal complications which prevent a team from working this way? What other company priorities may be worth sacrificing this efficiency for? (via Brad Frost)

NYC Phil

Rob invited me out to the NYC Philharmoic on Saturday. We started the night with dinner at Jeju in the West Village, an excellent Korean place I'd return to. I had the gochu ramyun, Rob the donkatsu, and we split the fried chicken app. We had extra time, so we grabbed some scotch at the old Art Bar; place was still packed and going strong.

The performance was really nice. I don't have the words to appropriately describe the pieces, but I did learn plenty from Rob, not only about the music, but how orchestras and players work as an industry and career. 

The program:

• Mozart: K.505 aria
• Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major
• Mahler: Symphony No. 4

Xmas Cookies, Delayed

On Sunday night, February 4th, we held our annual Christmas cookies decorating ritual. A couple months late because of an ill-timed Covid infection in December, and someone’s visa complication throughout January. But! Elissa and Jarod finally made it over and we had a great hang. Another good year.

Beirut on AI

Michael Beirut with a great take on a benefit of AI:

"A majority of the world is boilerplate, and that's a good thing," Michael says. "Because all of us are motivated by two opposing kinds of needs. One is the need for predictability and comfort. And the other is the need for surprise and excitement. If you get that balance wrong and everything is just comfortable and predictable, you get bored. And that's not good. But on the other hand, the antidote to that isn't 100% unpredictability, surprise, and entertainment, because then you get too overstimulated and start to freak out. There's a certain reason why you wouldn't want every building on Fifth Avenue to look like the Guggenheim. It just would be too crazy in an unpleasant way. This architect was admiring some anonymous building somewhere in Manhattan, and they said, 'You know, what makes a city great is its ability to put up and maintain something like this, a perfectly good kind of background building that actually does its job well and isn't calling attention to itself.' But if you examine the details, you see that they're sound and built to last, and the tenants are satisfied. And then down the block and around the corner, there's something more special and showy that provides a great foil for that.”

So maybe ChatGPT, Midjourney, and all of those other new generative AI programs can be responsible for doing the boilerplate really well. Now, you've got time to do something a little more interesting. "Everyone dismisses boilerplate as crap that's not worth anyone's time," Bierut says. "You could argue boilerplate makes the world go round, whether it's in architecture, design, or writing. Boilerplate makes things that are special look and feel more appropriately special. Maybe that's an appropriate way to think about the promise of AI, but I don't know."

This tracks with how I've been thinking about AI with respect to design (or any creative profession). It's going to be a tool which helps with boring, rote elements of a process. It'll be able to recreate and fuse older iterations of a craft in order to more quickly produce what had come before. It's just not going to be reliably able to make something humanist and new. At some point, the boundaries of what AI can produce will be obvious, and human beings will bend culture back to what is more fully human.

You can't believe the tech bros about this. They're going to claim AI will be possible of anything — including self-awareness and then becoming our new god. Whatever AI creatures they do eventually create will look and act like them, because people are only able to create gods in their own image. In the case of AI, that god will also be white, male, and techno-centric.

Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing how art and society eventually push back on the upcoming AI-obsessed culture. It should be really human. Really tactile and emotional. Think about how Grunge reset the table on music as we turned into the 1990s. AI stuff will always look clean and rich. It'll have a pristine quality to it, even when prompted to not. Because it's expensive. And it's run by rich people. The pushback to it is going to be a good time. It's going to be the Guggenheims on a street full of forgettable buildings.

Advice from Gaiman

Posted by Jennifer Grand on BlueSky.

[E]xquisite advice from [Neil Gaiman]
“When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”