In a recent article Bruce Schneier talks about the permanent
impact of
architectural decisions:
"Form follows function. From medieval castles to modern
airports, security
concerns have always influenced architecture..."
"These changes were expensive. The problem is that
architecture tends toward
permanence, while security threats change much faster.
Something that seemed
a good idea when a building was designed might make little
sense a century
-- or even a decade -- later. But by then it's hard to undo
those
architectural decisions."
<http://www.wired.
com/news/columns/0,71968-0.html>
Why is this relevant to us?
I see best practices as the equivalent of this in design.
Today's best
practice (because someone else, or everybody else for that
matter, is doing
it so it must be the best way to do it syndrome) becomes
tomorrow's
legacy/eyesore/dysfunctional crap some of us are hired to
undo.
In a similar vein, I'm also watching videos of Douglas
Crockford, Yahoošs
JavaScript guy, talking about how architectural decisions
made by Netscape,
Microsoft and W3C affected web designers/developers for
years to come:
<http://yuiblog.com/blog/2006/10/20/video-crockf
ord-domtheory/>
Getting architectural decisions right is obviously supremely
important in
design. It's very easy to miss:
Newsweek: "Other companies had already tried to make a
hard disk drive music
player. Why did Apple get it right?
Steve Jobs: We had the hardware expertise, the industrial
design expertise
and the software expertise, including iTunes. One of the
biggest insights we
have was that we decided not to try to manage your music
library on the
iPod, but to manage it in iTunes. Other companies tried to
do everything on
the device itself and made it so complicated that it was
useless."
<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15262121/site/newsweek/>
Perhaps the most amazing discovery of the obvious is
Microsoft's two-decades
late realization that hardware/software/service integration
(as opposed to
commodity component amalgamation) is the better architecture
in the CE
space: Zune.
One of the principal objectives of designers should be
wrestling the mantle
of architecture from others...and being equipped to do so.
Lest we are
relegated to implementers of the insignificant.
----
Ziya
Usability > Simplify the Solution
Design > Simplify the Problem
------------
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