Cody Iddings: But I’m immediately put off by the idea that designers are stylists and that the engineers are responsible for the “manufacturing, function, quality, safety, and ergonomics.”

It’s a fair point, but I think there are a few things to keep in mind regarding this particular paper and Cagan and Vogel’s larger point:

• This is a study on the perceptual differences between practitioners of specific disciplines. The disciplines accordingly have to be defined. They could have been defined more narrowly (or broadly), but the authors chose a separation of concerns that reflects the reality of their subjects—this is an ethnographic study.
• A core assertion of Cagan and Vogel in “Creating Breakthrough Products” is that teams create better products when they are interdisciplinary. That doesn’t just mean that teams are comprised of people with different job titles, but that there’s a venn diagram of disciplines that overlap in responsibilities. In fact, Cagan and Vogel explicitly state “it is the overlaps between disciplines that define the value of the product to the consumer.”
• In CBP, they define style (page 33) as “the sensory elements that communicate the desired aesthetic and human factors of a product or service.” They go on to state that this includes ergonomics, market requirements, behavioral psychology, safety, ease-of-use, etc. So it’s a much larger definition than the one presented in the “Understanding Perceptual Gaps…” paper. They also later note that the technology aspects of products, including things like materials and manufacturing decisions, are shared by designers.

There’s also a 100-year (at least) history of both pedagogy and practice around designers being cross-disciplinary. From the Bauhaus…

“The Bauhaus wants to train a new kind of collaborator for industry
and the crafts, who has an equal command of both technology and form” (Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Dessau: Principles of Bauhaus Production, 1926)

… to the Ulm school model and post-war industrial designers like Henry Dreyfuss:

“The industrial designer must be part engineer, part businessman, part salesmans, part public relations man, artist…” (Henry Dreyfuss, Designing for People, 1955)

Cody Iddings: I think what people like Jared M. Spool and Daniel Burka are saying is that design isn’t just about the form and the style […] It’s that when you make an intentional business decision (in any respect), you are affecting the experience of the customer, you are changing their behaviour, and ultimately, your making a design decision.

Sure, my response is just that this thesis is very handwavy and not tactically useful to developing great products. Acknowledging that all aspects of a business can have an affect on the product doesn’t move you any closer to producing great product.

Daniel Burka is in fact explicitly talking about improving product design outcomes through discipline collaboration inside of a company. His core point is that “each person needs to be armed with the tools to understand how their decisions affect the customer experience.” And there’s deep, practical prior art on that subject.

“Everyone is a designer” is also reductionist because a division of labor is an inevitable part of producing products at (industrial) scale. While there should be much overlap between disciplines when creating products, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t fundamental differences between roles that have to be acknowledged. I’ll go back to Cagan and Vogel here:

“Engineers are the only group trained for perform analytical simulation such as finite element or computational fluid dynamics analysis. Designers tend to be the players trained in human factors, aesthetics, and 3D physical modeling. Marketing and finance tend to be trained in cost structure and market characterization. Engineers and designers can bring a unique perspective to market research, designers and marketing researchers to feature definition, and engineering and marketing researchers to user preferences. Each discipline, however, will still be responsible for details in their area.” (Creating Breakthrough Products, page 162–163)