I remember first reading about design Vs engineering when I was studying my Masters Degree. I believe it was a HBR article with respects to the internal conflict at BMW. At the time I didn't think too much about the problem. It seemed reasonable but something that I probably wouldn't need to ever really consider solving.
I suppose it was just another one of those occasions where I had my head buried in the sand. 6 years into building our web business products it took a trip to the EO Cape Town University for me to finally realise how important that article really was and more importantly how important it is to Platform Interactive, with respects to the continuous development of our product suite.
What further cemented the importance of creativity to me was a recent presentation on my return by my team where a developer had produced a widget in a new release that I traditionally wouldn't have signed off on.
I presented that widget to a few customers and we got the "wow" factor. 2 days later a Government department signed off on the purchase of the software.
Design is all around us. No more so than the creativity and wow factor of the iPhone.From a users perspective I think they got so much wrong but it seems that Apple's funky innovation and design have landed them a winner.
Never again will design or creativity take a back seat when we develop our applications. The conflict will have to be resoved by the engineers so that we can make it work for our product and customers.
