Showing posts with label Design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Design. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Conceptual Integrity Part 1 ... or Why Committees Can't Do Doodly

Last night at DevTalk LA (that Geeky local book club), having finished our book, we read two articles. We do this in-between books, to allow members a little extra time to get the book in-hand. Next week, we'll start the eagerly anticipated RESTful Web APIs by Richardson & Amundsen.

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This book appears to be a complete rewrite of their earlier RESTFul Web Services (2007). It was, by universal acclamation of Dev Talk LA, one of the better books we've recently read, and advance opinion holds the re-write to take things on the next level and clear up all our questions.

The two articles can be (and should be!) read on-line here:

We spent most of the time on Paul Graham's essay.

If you haven't read Paul Graham, you need to stop reading here and get on with it. Buy his book. Read his essays. Just do it. The short-version of why is this: Paul Graham is a twice-successful Startup enterpreneur who built his success upon technical excellence. He's a big proponent of the rapid development he found possible through the use of Lisp, of which his is an advocate and presently is designing/promoting Arc, a Lisp derivative of his own. But there are two additional factors that make him a compelling figure.

First, he's done something other than technology. He's also a painter. And the interplay of what he has learned from both shows clearly in his very insightful and reflective essays. Secondly, he understands, in a very no-nonsense way the value and importance of passion. From last nights essay, for instance, came this timeless quote:
To make something good, you have to be thinking, "wow, this is really great," not "what a piece of shit; those fools will love it." 
Which brings us to the point of today's essay.

Conceptual Integrity.

It's important.

Really important.

Paul Graham gets it, too.

As he puts it, (highlights mine)
Notice all this time I've been talking about "the designer." Design usually has to be under the control of a single person to be any good. And yet it seems to be possible for several people to collaborate on a research project. This seems to me one of the most interesting differences between research and design. 
There have been famous instances of collaboration in the arts, but most of them seem to have been cases of molecular bonding rather than nuclear fusion. In an opera it's common for one person to write the libretto and another to write the music. And during the Renaissance, journeymen from northern Europe were often employed to do the landscapes in the backgrounds of Italian paintings. But these aren't true collaborations. They're more like examples of Robert Frost's "good fences make good neighbors." You can stick instances of good design together, but within each individual project, one person has to be in control. 
I'm not saying that good design requires that one person think of everything. There's nothing more valuable than the advice of someone whose judgement you trust. But after the talking is done, the decision about what to do has to rest with one person.
Why is it that research can be done by collaborators and design can't? This is an interesting question. I don't know the answer. Perhaps, if design and research converge, the best research is also good design, and in fact can't be done by collaborators. A lot of the most famous scientists seem to have worked alone. [ed. note: see my "Never Hire The Greatest Scientist The World Has Ever Known"] But I don't know enough to say whether there is a pattern here. It could be simply that many famous scientists worked when collaboration was less common. 
Whatever the story is in the sciences, true collaboration seems to be vanishingly rare in the arts. Design by committee is a synonym for bad design. Why is that so? Is there some way to beat this limitation? 
I'm inclined to think there isn't-- that good design requires a dictator. One reason is that good design has to be all of a piece. Design is not just for humans, but for individual humans. If a design represents an idea that fits in one person's head, then the idea will fit in the user's head too.

I wanted to collect these ideas into one place and last night was a wonderful impetus to do so.  But this posting is already too long, so it looks like we have to kick off a series. And what a wonderful topic for a series! Conceptual Integrity. And, I'm very happy to have one of my heroes, Paul Graham, give as forceful and thoughtful a kickoff as could be imagined.

I Remain,

TheHackerCIO