Creativity within bounds, or what is design engineering?

 

I've wanted to start a blog for quite a while now. I like sharing topics that I find interesting in hopes of introducing someone to something new, or having some nice discussions. 

If I'm being completely honest, I also like entertaining the idea that at some point my scribbles and musings may help in establishing myself as a knowledgeable person in my work field. After all, I've been at it for around twenty years!

There was a small hiccup with this plan however, throughout my career I've done an abysmal job of clearly communicating what I do. 

This may not seem as much of a problem initially, but as I wrote down the topics I'd like to talk about, my list started looking less like a compilation of cohesive items and more like a grocery list of completely unrelated talking points. That would make for a very poor presentation as a seasoned professional!

 

 After a long intro, let's start!

 

However, a couple of days ago I stumbled across two different articles from two different sources with two different points of view that spoke about the same issue. If I was waiting for an opportunity to introduce myself and my work in relation to current events, these publications were an amazing chance.

The topic for both publications was: "Design hand-off". This is the stage in which a designer or team of designers deliver their concept or prototype to the developers.

From the designer side, Taylor from UX Tools and Berk from Zeplin spoke about how they view the current state of design hand-off based on this survey report.

Their main takeaways include a consensus that even with real-time collaboration tools like Figma, many of the delivered designs are not well translated into the final product. 

They feel that a very likely culprit for this is the fact that more often than not, devs only receive limited specifications for the application and are not made aware of all the business strategy and user research done when creating said designs.

On the other hand, David Heinemeier, creator of Ruby on Rails and co-owner and CTO of 37signals made a short post that reads almost like a direct response to the previous conversation.

Their view on the matter is that in order to make the design hand-off more efficient, designers should make their concepts directly using HTML, CSS and Javascript, eliminating the need for an "abstraction layer" that can only hold a flat design.

Both publications make very good points and in an ideal world front-end engineer and [UX/UI] designer would be two names for the same position in modern app development. 

In the current world however, teams are made up from different people with differing talents and abilities. And even with the popularization of agile work methodologies and workshops designed to make inter-disciplinary work faster and more efficient, there are still issues with communications between design and development teams.

A design hand-off...

 

Which finally brings us to the main point of this writing...

Design engineering is a field that resides between designers and developers. The idea is to become a bridge between two areas that historically have trouble communicating effectively. 

In short, a design engineer understands the decisions designers take when creating visual assets and information flows as well as the capabilities and constraints the developers face when translating those designs into the live product and does their best to keep both teams aligned throughout the project.

Some regular tasks would include working with the design team so they understand the constraints that the frameworks and tools impose on developers so their designs are easy to translate to the live product and also letting the developers know who the customers are, what they will use the product for as well as how it ties into the company's business plan so they can also add their input into how a design should look.

Additionally, a design engineer is in a great position to lead the effort of creating a project design system that can little by little make working on new interfaces faster and more accessible for the whole team. 

If I'm allowed to throw in some of my experience, being able to gain such a global view of a project naturally lends itself for design engineers to champion UX principles.

 

Design engineering in the middle

 

Closing thoughts:

I wanted to make this post as a sort of introduction and also to provide some preemptive reasoning as to why my topics will jump from talking about design tendencies and branding topics to CSS frameworks, Web3 and many things in between.

I tend to ramble quite a bit when I speak and it seems I do the same when writing! 

Hopefully this was entertaining, interesting or both. Don't hesitate to leave a comment, a critique or simply to reach out if you think I may be of assistance.

Here's hoping this is the first of many posts!

If you made it all the way to the end I sincerely thank you for your time. 

Let's keep creating!