World of a classical Designer and a Software Designer

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.

Leaning from Designers, we in software world should celebrate Software Designers. My soaking continues.