I was in the audience of a presentation by Dave Neary in Dublin a few days ago. The presentation was all about managing open source projects, i.e. managing the community that creates these projects.

The room was filled with developers. Lots of black background terminal windows open. The smell of Yoda’s soup brewing in the corner… Socially handicapped geeks, one could easily utter without giving it a second thought. Then it dawned on me that what I was witnessing was a gathering of passionate creators who are all striving to seek new and more effective ways of working together, in many cases from different continents, for the greater good of open source projects they believe in.

I then tried to imagine this same gathering but with designers. (Silence) Not saying that designers do not collaborate, but there is something about their nature that is not really compatible with these architectures of participation. Their inherent need for polished performance inhibits the growth of these types of community structures. Look for designers and the way the web caters to their needs and you’ll find Portfolio browsers at the top of the list. Websites where one can show off ones photoshop skills… Style boosters… Designers scour the web for websites which aggregate the work of other designers and derive inspiration from them. It all comes down to two main drivers: digital performance and style inspiration, that’s it. You don’t see designers get together in dodgy IRC rooms and discuss how they are going to collaborate so as to collectively design a logo, a typeface or a billboard… That would immediately be seen as impossible, as impossible as ‘design by committee’. As impossible as an artist painting and allowing others to paint in the same canvas.

We work in really big projects with many managers, managing both designers and developers. No matter how complex the project is, the people managing developers can always distribute tasks in a much more structured and organic way. Design managers, even those with a very cohesive vision, speak about design engineering,  when the reality is more like engineering design. Unless you have weekly meetings like Cupertino does and both teams feel like they are part of something magical, Designers will tend to feel like they are a higher level, passing down their designs to socially handicaped builders.

Most designers are not concerned in sharing and growing their work horizontally. Maybe it’s the fine-arts background, or the design super egos from the second half of the 20th century, but they would rather impose it vertically. So it is with great interest that we look at open source communities, their operational patterns and try and incorporate some of its learning into design management and new communities of open source design.

Aware of all of the above I stopped hiring designers and started hiring architects who deal primarily with space. Engineers who understand the beauty inherent to materials, in our case the aesthetic that surfaces from the computation layer. Above all, people who understand space, and what space humans need to perform certain actions.

Product layer == Illusion layer

For a long time I had designers working on an illusion layer. Photoshoping their way to stardom, using the new tools Thomas Knoll and his team release on a yearly basis. An illusion layer that serves the simple and necessary purpose of making code usable to everyone. A button that looks like a leaver, a tab pinched from a second world war filing system. All metaphorical elements that allow users to navigate and create a mental map of space, even if it’s one which does not make any real spacial sense. Windows popping everywhere, slide left, right… a hyperlinked reality after all. It’s a tricky one, space.

Architects understand and play with space in a coherent and linear way. That is why I believe that if you want to push the boundaries in design-engineering, working with architects on the illusion layer is our best way to innovate. And we’ve been doing so.

The DNA everyone is talking about. The DNA Apple managed to construct and replicate in people’s minds… Well a new DNA must come from a better understanding and exploration of space in user interaction. In order to perform an action, users first need to create an image of the space they have to navigate in order to perform that action. Space is at the core of the illusion layer, and the trick is to make it less and less riddled with rabbit holes and fancy effects, and more and more based on simple spacial metaphors. Map out your walls, your doors and windows, and your illusion layer will easily contaminate people’s minds…