I recently attended Pune Design Festival
(PDF) organized by ADI (Association of Designers of India), Pune Chapter.
Having relieved myself of the organisational responsibilities at TiE Pune and
Mojo Networks, I felt I have more bandwidth for me to soak into the ADI world.
At the outset, I must say the objective of
soaking with ‘Designers’ and breathing the same air was achieved. I came out
‘thinking’ more about ‘Design’ as ADI Designers think and ‘Design’ in software
that that has occupied my mind for the past 35 years or so.
‘Design’ may mean many things to many
people. It appeared to me that Designers from ADI express their design as an
artefact, a physical object, a sketch or a drawing or a painting, with colours,
contours, styles, typefaces etc. Designs were very visible. You can touch and
feel these. And, I must say everything was artistic and beautiful. Aesthetics
was in abundance. At times designs intended to tell a story, convey a
philosophy and even build a brand, very serious and difficult endeavour. Some of
the work combined rich and diverse arts and artisans in India with the
contemporary world. It was amazing. There was also a session on applying
principles of Design to designing businesses. Art was part of the discussion. Someone
said, “Design evolves to an art”.
While soaking in Designers’ world, the idea
was to get a better understanding of the design of an ADI Designer world and
the world of a software designer.
Explicit expression is ingrained in the
Designer world. While in software, many aspects of design are often implicit. In
software, somehow we feel we are dealing with the inanimate world. So the beauty
of design does not seem to find an expression. Beauty and aesthetics may be far
from software designers’ mind while dealing with aspects like reliability,
scalability and extendibility. ADI Designers are more live with their
creations. Simplicity and elegance of design is prevalent in both.
Designers create objects and many were on
display at the PDF Expo. An object whether it's a logo or classy furniture is
intuitive to Designers. On the other hand, software ‘object’ was not so evident
to software designers. Its birth took a long time and even longer for it to be
adopted by the community. While it has
evolved, its expression is still incomplete.
A well designed algorithm, workflow,
specification of a program is a work of art. If there is mathematics at the
core of such a design, it's a work of art. Researchers and designers of advanced
techniques like machine learning are creating profound mathematical objects de
art and must be having the same feeling. Even routine software presents
significant challenges and good design can be an object de art.
This must interest not only to people whose
profession is ‘Design” but also CEOs, CTOs, other corporate executives and
entrepreneurs as technology not just enables or supports a business, technology
is the business. And software is the kernel of any technology today.
