✍️ New post: Design and Engineering, As One

A #longread about a man with a stopwatch, a school in Weimar, and why the gap between design and engineering isn’t an accident.

https://matthiasott.com/articles/design-and-engineering-as-one

Design and Engineering, As One · Matthias Ott

We inherited our product processes from a 19th-century steel works. Frederick Winslow Taylor separated thinking from doing, managers from makers, designers from builders – and a hundred years later, most digital product teams are still running on that model. The gap between design and engineering isn’t an accident. It was designed in. And it can be designed out.

Matthias Ott – Web Design Engineer
@matthiasott *Love* this one, Matthias
@tylersticka That makes my day! 😊🙌
@matthiasott nice one! Although I studied industrial design engineering, after switching to web stuff it took me long to realize that I still am a design engineer. Many orgs incentivize or even force making a clear choice between design and engineering. They just want replaceable robots. It’s time to make design engineering a thing in web design!
@matthiasott I read your articles for the first time and I absolutely loved it. I think most of what you said applies to iOS or Android as well; it makes me feel like we need design engineers on our app side too.
@cagataygedik Thank you, glad you enjoyed it! 🤗 Yes, you’re right – this is equally true for other areas of digital design (engineering).
@matthiasott @tylersticka dreaming of a Bauhaus for the web
@matthiasott I've been thinking about software in the Bauhaus tradition on and off for a while now, and this cleanly gets to the heart of it. Thanks for writing it!