Technology Design... It's what I do!
At Bloomberg, employees don't get official titles with the exception of a few C level and upper management folks. The rest of us live with the blessing and curse of having no fixed identity. When I meet someone new from another company and I hand over my business card, there is no job title to provide an anchor for my new colleague to have the first clue who I am or how I represent Bloomberg. On the other hand this opens up the possibility for me to sign my emails in any way that may fit the circumstance.
But after reading Gadi Amit's article titled, "It's Time for Industrial Design to Grow Up" I may have finally found my job title - Technology Designer. I had the pleasure of speaking to Gadi Amit as he pitched New Deal Design services to the Bloomberg Hardware Team. He is a thoughtful designer who describes perfectly the new challenges of designing complex devices and the systems within and around them to form a complete experience.
The excerpts below give the basic outline of his concept of Technology Designer.
This is where we need to leave behind the old world of industrial design and develop a new vernacular. That’s why I call what I do technology design.
And what does that mean? In designing an object, I define what can be done physically or digitally, delivering what kind of experience, at what speed, with what kind of future roadmap for the business and its physical-digital experience. That’s technology design in a nutshell.
If it sounds complex, that’s because it is. In fact, very few companies get it right. Navigating such a multi-dimensional universe requires far more integration and talent than ever before. It requires a team of multi-dimensional thinkers, with acute knowledge of little details and how they affect the big picture. Traditional business-case or management theories cannot deliver that level of dexterity.
Technology designers deal with both the physical and digital. In doing so, they inform engineering of the right components, their layout and how they connect to a bigger software platform, either on a mobile phone or in the cloud. In the process, they set sizes, costs, and form factors.
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In practice here’s what technology designers do:
1. Design the object’s form
2. Define the architecture of the object’s innards
3. Navigate between software and hardware
4. Define the path for multiple players (IE Communicate with all stakeholders from all disciplines)
Read the full article here: https://www.fastcodesign.com/3039934/its-time-for-industrial-design-to-grow-up