I enjoyed this post, it's a good kick-off for a discussion, but I don't think it quite gets at the real point of contention between designers and developers (bt

I enjoyed this post, it's a good kick-off for a discussion, but I don't think it quite gets at the real point of contention between designers and developers (btw, the original post is clearly about more than just software, whereas my response is more or less limited to software and especially web application development). "To an engineer, design seems like an unnecessary and tangental part of the creation process. “It just needs to work,” we say, “it doesn’t need to be pretty!”" I don't personally know any programmers who would say this (with full recognition that everyone's personal experience can be unrepresentative). What I have heard developers say (well, not quite so bluntly), is "I don't need designers to help me create software, I just need them to pretty it up at the end." This, of course, trivializes the designer's role in the development process. Some designers take an approach that marginalizes programmers just as badly - "I don't need programmers to help me create software, I just need them to code up my vision." I actually have seen both approaches result in usable software. Intricate wireframes to the nth detail finally handed over to an antisocial programmer who just codes it up has worked. Programmers who write an ap, and then hand it off to a "designer" who pretties it up with nice fonts and borders has worked. But it's better when they work together throughout the process, and it's best when all members of the team have skills in both areas. To me, this is actually one of those situations where the more you can get into a single head, the better. The programmers are probably in a slightly stronger situation, since they can ship and they all have some ability to create UI, whereas I know a lot of designers who simply can't code. So the designers with no programming skkills can't write software without the help of a programmer, whereas a programmer with poor design skills would probably just write crappy software. But ultimately, I think the problem here is notion that designer and programmer are exclusive terms. People will lean one way or the other, but you just can't score a zero in one of these two categories.