TITLE: If Design is Important, Do It All The Time AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: March 11, 2015 4:15 PM DESC: ----- BODY: And you don't have to be in software. In Jonathan Ive and the Future of Apple, Ian Parker describes how the process of developing products at Apple has changed during Ive's tenure.
... design had been "a vertical stripe in the chain of events" in a product's delivery; at Apple, it became "a long horizontal stripe, where design is part of every conversation." This cleared a path for other designers.
By the time the iPhone launched, Ive had become "the hub of the wheel". The vertical stripe/horizontal stripe image brought to mind Kent Beck's reimagining of the software development cycle in XP. I was thinking the image in my head came from Extreme Programming Explained, but the closest thing to my memory I can find is in his IEEE Computer article, Embracing Change with Extreme Programming:
if it's important, do it all the time
My mental image has time on the x-axis, though, which meshes better with the vertical/horizontal metaphor of Robert Brunner, the designer quoted in the passage above.
design as a thin vertical stripe versus design as a long horizontal stripe
If analysis is important, do it all the time. If design is important, do it all the time. If implementation is important, do it all the time. If testing is important, do it all the time. Ive and his team have shown that there is value in making design an ongoing part of the process for developing hardware products, too, where "design is part of every conversation". This kind of thinking is not just for software any more. -----