Design nightmare reality

Wanted to list some design nightmares, especially mindset challenges I face day to day. Would love to get the input of others in the same field and how you manage to overcome the roadblocks.

The next big thing

Some folks view design as “the next big thing”, in the sarcastic sense. Here today, gone in a year. I’d like to think that Don Norman kickstarted the whole concept of design thinking in 1988. (Wikipedia states the concept originated in 1969 with Herbert Simon’s The Sciences of the Artificial) Either way, it’s definitely been around a couple of decades.

The sad reality is that technology was not advanced enough to help us fulfill design goals. I.e Ideal 3D software would only require a user to dream of the image, realistically the closest we have is Autocad or 3DMax.

Apps are the design panacea

In my experience for folks who believe apps are the panacea to all organizational problems (internal and external) have never even heard of IDEO. (So far 7 out of 7. It won’t qualify as a sizeable population, but I’m not looking to write a piece of statistical data)

Personally these are probably the folks who caused the dot com bubble and the imminent apps bubble. (Technically there’s not much money to be made off apps anymore. Over saturated red market)

Design is a waste of time

Without proper design, why bother? The user base would be limited to friends, family and perhaps the family pet. There is a chance it could be a huge hit, but I wouldn’t invest in a product that does not take design of their products seriously.

Hardware before software

This is seriously like horse before the cart. Hardware and software should be in unison. To focus on one would limit capabilities that could have been used to fulfill the applications full potential.