One (hard but effective) way to really understand these lessons is to set up your own service business, when you start to grok how fast you run out of time, energy and money to make everything as good as you’d ideally like, along with the impossibility of making your service “right” for everyone. You also start to really appreciate win-win opportunities, where you can make things better for customers and better for you the owner - and how much they’re not common.
Yes! We all learn so much from being an entrepreneur, even if it's something small like an app or a side-hustle. It's quite eye-opening to have to make every tradeoff decision a business has to make.
Design is a beautiful word, but it also has its downsides. Its abstract nature can mislead some people. For decades, designers have been asked to prove their value and impact. I appreciate quality; perhaps we should change the title of 'Designer' to 'Quality Builder.' Everything is about quality, and only designers care about and pursue quality endlessly. After all, no one dislikes good or better quality.
From what I know, every word is problematic in some way. You're asking good questions for sure, but the word quality has it's own baggage of "quality assurance engineers" - people who claimed to be experts at raising quality, but who were often maligned for focusing on the most easily measureable, and therefore often the least useful, notions of what quality is (often engineering quality, which is more about building than designing to use the terms I used in this post).
And then there is Demming, who was wise and thoughtful, and famous for teaching about quality, but his work on quality had negligible impact in the long term. Not sure how well recognized his name is but he is a good one to know.
In the end my advice is to be a student of every approach to quality and good design, and to be fluent in many different ways to talk about it. That's the way forward. If you can talk fluently to an engineer, a CEO, a marketer, and a customer about quality, then you can be a translator and seek ideas that will bring everyone together.
You're totally right, the role title isn't the key point—what truly matters is communication, especially tailoring different strategies for different roles. I think designers often focus too much on their work and overlook training in this aspect. Thank you for sharing!
Sometimes I use “quality” to communicate with designers and i found it also lands on many aspects. Discuss what quality means and reaching alignment for specific case is also necessary.
One (hard but effective) way to really understand these lessons is to set up your own service business, when you start to grok how fast you run out of time, energy and money to make everything as good as you’d ideally like, along with the impossibility of making your service “right” for everyone. You also start to really appreciate win-win opportunities, where you can make things better for customers and better for you the owner - and how much they’re not common.
Yes! We all learn so much from being an entrepreneur, even if it's something small like an app or a side-hustle. It's quite eye-opening to have to make every tradeoff decision a business has to make.
Design is a beautiful word, but it also has its downsides. Its abstract nature can mislead some people. For decades, designers have been asked to prove their value and impact. I appreciate quality; perhaps we should change the title of 'Designer' to 'Quality Builder.' Everything is about quality, and only designers care about and pursue quality endlessly. After all, no one dislikes good or better quality.
Good thoughts. Thanks for the comment.
From what I know, every word is problematic in some way. You're asking good questions for sure, but the word quality has it's own baggage of "quality assurance engineers" - people who claimed to be experts at raising quality, but who were often maligned for focusing on the most easily measureable, and therefore often the least useful, notions of what quality is (often engineering quality, which is more about building than designing to use the terms I used in this post).
And then there is Demming, who was wise and thoughtful, and famous for teaching about quality, but his work on quality had negligible impact in the long term. Not sure how well recognized his name is but he is a good one to know.
In the end my advice is to be a student of every approach to quality and good design, and to be fluent in many different ways to talk about it. That's the way forward. If you can talk fluently to an engineer, a CEO, a marketer, and a customer about quality, then you can be a translator and seek ideas that will bring everyone together.
You're totally right, the role title isn't the key point—what truly matters is communication, especially tailoring different strategies for different roles. I think designers often focus too much on their work and overlook training in this aspect. Thank you for sharing!
Sometimes I use “quality” to communicate with designers and i found it also lands on many aspects. Discuss what quality means and reaching alignment for specific case is also necessary.