« Excellent article, Tony. I love the two themes you brought up.

Excellent article, Tony. I love the two themes you brought up.

1) Design is the practice of finding the right fit for a form. Form refers to any set of boundaries, objectives, and materials. The designer takes those constraints and tries to improve a given situation.

The form of enterprise is unusually complex, like an organism, so most of the design occurs under the surface. Pre-internet enterprise companies operate on a different timescale. It can feel alien. To me, it feels like city planning or anthropology.

The network of different cultures and evolved beliefs in the company are part of the designer’s material.

2) That’s the second theme in your article that I like so much.

There’s a big debate about whether designers should code. Some think that knowing how the sausage is made will limit how a designer thinks. But this problem seems to be poorly framed.

An architect spends years understanding their material before they are allowed to make buildings. Does this limit what’s possible? Absolutely. But it also reinforces that the purpose of design to improve people’s lives, not simply to apply design methods.

Technical training for an architect seems obvious because people move around inside buildings. A miscalculation of the form could kill.

We live inside digital products now and I think our designs should be a matter of public health, not just growth metrics. That means designers need to think in different timescales, understand the end-to-end system, and imagine how a solution might fail in different contexts.

Now that machine learning is a new material, we need designers who don’t just see data as proof, but as unreliable narrators. They may not need to understand the intricacies of linear algebra, but they can see the form, context, and infrastructure of data.

We had a very enjoyable talk about machine learning. I love that more designers are teaching themselves machine learning and vice versa. In short, we need more design-hybrids like yourself. Thanks.