On March 25th I attended a presentation by Alan Cooper. He replayed the core of his opening keynote from this year’s Interaction 08. After the response to this same presentation given in Savannah, I was expecting something much more controversial. A lot of his message was actually pretty easy to digest, if a bit unrealistic. In talking with Dan Saffer, it seems that the controversial part of Savannah came during the Q&A where Cooper said that IxD’s should not build stuff.

Peter Merholz attended the SF version as well and offered his thoughts:

Alan makes a lot of good points in his talk (many of which we make at Adaptive Path, such as how thoughtful design allowed iPod and Palm to beat predecessors, the value of distinguishing between design engineering and production engineering, and the value of the Quick Win), but he lost me when he advocated ignoring the business folks because they simply won’t get it. Not just “don’t” get it, but “won’t” get it. He seems to think that business folks are wired in such a way that they can’t handle the post-industrial economy. He also believes that attempts to quantify business value of post-industrial work is a fool’s errand.

He basically told the audience what they want to hear, but not what they need to hear.

I heard these four main points:

1) Business managers are stuck inside of an industrial/manufacturing mind set. Peter summed this up well.

2) Interaction designers and programmers need to work together for a bottom-up revolt to business. He thinks that a commitment to user needs and to quality will result in better products every time. He asked that when a practitioner is pushed to give ROI numbers to management, the IxD responds by asking “what do we measure?”. He doesn’t think that software development costs can be measured, at least not in the same way done for manufacturing, which is what managers are grasping for.

3) There is insufficient specialization within the software development world. He offered examples from the world of construction as a contrast.

4) There’s two types of programmers: those who want to release a product out the door and those who want to focus on “getting it right” and deal with the technical design problems. He called the latter “design engineers”.

Surprise! The notion of a Design Technologist resonated with me. Mr. Cooper is a genius I tell ya!

I question his notion that more specialization is needed and think that his examples are a bit faulty. To me, specialization of skills is MORE industrial, where staff did a specific job on the manufacturing floor every day, for years. Alan himself is a generalist, and if he wasn’t he would not be the success that we see. He’s an IxD and a businessman and a people manager and a speaker and clearly knows a lot about the programming world. Additionally, most IxD’s bring a variety of skills to their job and if they didn’t have that generalist background, they would be less valuable. A developer who has a well-rounded history is also more valuable.

Alan thinks that agile is great in the design engineering phase of a project, and thats it. Here we are seeing the opposite to be true. Incorporating agile concepts into design and allowing both design and development to iterate TOGETHER is proving more and more valuable. I see that the #1 output of an inclusive agile approach is higher quality since less is missed as you iterate over ideas. You don’t have to figure out everything up front. I think that Cooper sees agile as a means for efficiency, not quality.

I’ll end my thoughts by saying that I found it strange to have a design pioneer talk about how programmers need to change. I know that he’s taking this message to them, and I wonder if the audience of programmers thinks “stay out of our business”.