appreciation |əˌprēSHēˈāSHən|
noun
sensitive understanding of the aesthetic value of something: courses in music appreciation.

Innerview

Here is my view on the designer- developer “divide” is : its not.

It’s a left brain — right brain divide. Most of the employees of the world have been schooled in evaluative, left brain thinking. The designers, who are the minority in any company have been schooled in generative, right brain thinking.

It’s more like two islands with a missing bridge.

As anyone who has learnt to sketch will tell you, it is possible to construct a bridge from one side of the brain to the other. The key is deep appreciation. This in turn starts a lifelong love affair.

An individual’s ability to draw is… the ability to shift to a different-from-ordinary way of processing visual information – to shift from verbal, analytic processing to spatial, global processing. — Betty Edwards

The Power of Appreciation

Let’s take an example from a more extreme discipline than design to see how appreciation can bridge these two minds.

Art is arguably more subjective than design. Therefore more open to misunderstanding. Humans being form-fixated creatures need objects to lock onto.

Imagine then a painter who’s work largely resembles drips of paint.

Needless to say, I’m an admirer. See more of his work at jackson-pollock.org

Imagine trying to understand what this painting means. I can almost hear the art gallery owner and the viewers ( all evaluative thinkers ) say — “ well, this looks like something my four year old could do!”.

Tragically, though not surprisingly, he was ridiculed by many — including older style artists. Until in 1950, Hans Namuth, a young photographer, recorded this video of Pollock working and explaining his process :

Watching him work changed people’s perception of Pollock and his work. It showed the urgency, intensity and skills involved in his style of working. The method to his beautiful madness.

I want to express my feelings, rather than illustrate them — Jackson Pollock

Watching him work, slowed down his creative process, enough for the evaluative viewers to appreciate it. Creating a bridge between generative and evaluative thinking.

So how might we apply this to the designer-developer divide ?

Blowing Up Bridges

Well, why does the divide exist in the first place ?

We designers have had a significant hand it creating it. By making design exalted. By making our process a black box. By making the act of revealing the final form a performance.

In this way, what we have done is no different from what the world of finance has done. Shrouded our way of work in secrecy to draw prestige from it. By making the design process, The Design Process.

This is what created the distance in the first place.

We distance what we do not understand.

IDEO, by contrast went in the opposite direction. It democratised the process, explained the grammar and made it so everyone could try it out.

However, democratising drops quality. At least initially, before a new class of creators mature to take advantage of the opportunity. This is what collective experimentation looks like :

This lasts until the collective figure out how to do something amazing with it. Press R anytime when the video at the site below runs :

This creates the impression that democratising design thinking is in fact encouraging sloppy craftsmanship. I believe this is simply the YouTube phenomenon all over again. As the new class of creators learns to take advantage of it, the focus on craftsmanship with return to the forefront again.

At which point we will simply have created even more distance between evaluative and generative thinkers. Just that there may be more generative thinkers making the evaluative thinker feel isolated.

Building Bridges

So how might we bridge the developer-designer divide ?

Even with the incredible work IDEO has done to democratise design thinking, my sense is, to an evaluative viewer, design looks like a Jackson Pollock painting.

Except now, we’ve handed him the can of paint saying : “ here try it yourself. You’ll love it!”

Unsurprisingly, he’s made a mess of it the first few times.

Instead, begin with Appreciation. Here is what a designer colleague mentioned to me, while watching another colleague sketching :

I could watch him for hours

I believe his opinion is not unique. Design, like cooking is eminently watchable. People want to see how something beautiful was made.

For example, here’s a series of beautiful posters by Toronto-based Ryan McArthur :

And here’s how the Henry Ford poster came together :

My submission is, slowing down the design process, makes it possible for an evaluative viewer to appreciate it. And develop a lifelong love affair with design.

It also makes obvious how much work there is in crafting something beautiful. And why we fuss as much as we do over tiny details. This is the opposite of doing a big reveal. It’s watching us work.

Like watching a Pollock take shape before your eyes.