At The Intersection of Technology and Liberal Arts

When Apple (AAPL) announced the iPad, their latest creation, on Januarary 27th Steve Jobs closed with a very interesting glimpse into how Apple creates game-changing products in the highly competitive, and highly saturated, mobile marketplace. In Steve’s words:

We’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, to be able to get the best of both, to make extremely advanced products from a technology point of view, but also have them be intuitive, easy to use, fun to use, so that they really fit the users – the users don’t have to come to them, they come to the user.

His words felt more like fatherly advice than a mission statement. In the past, technology companies focused on technology for technology sake: Success was measured by results coming from high technical goals, yet low human interface goals. Mr Jobs was telling the world that Apple has always chosen technology to serve the person with whom the device is interacting.

Apple A4 Processor

Another glimpse was given into how Apple actually drives through this intersection of technology and liberal arts. Apple’s Hardware VP, Bob Mansfield, talked about the new processor designed by Apple, the A4, and how the hardware and software teams worked in concert to create a processor to help Apple meet high user interface design goals. Many companies tend to silo-off their hardware and software teams. Touch devices like the iPhone have shown us we live in a software-driven hardware world. The makers of these devices must behave accordingly in order to create compelling experiences that compete with what Apple has created thus far.

Many organizations seem to understand at a certain level that this intersection is important for success. The creation of design departments within their engineering departments seem to allude to this understanding. However, getting the various disciplines to work in concert is another challenge altogether.

Alan Cooper and Ward Cunningham

As agile adoption has increased throughout the world, thought leaders from the agile and user experience communities have been talking past each other. All along they were both talking about same thing: better software.

The agile mindset seeks to create sustainable software. Agile wants to be iterative and embrace change: design just enough to bring value to the customer. User experience design on the other hand has carried a stigma of representing a big design up-front mentality.

The word customer was traditionally at the center of this misunderstanding. Agile values customer involvement in the software development process: a great approach when the goal is to create minimally marketable software. Close communication with the person paying you to produce software is a great way to ensure you do not over-produce.

The user experience mindset seeks to create humane software that improves people’s lives. In the user experience world the customer is the user. By taking care of your customer’s users, the customer is happy. A happy customer is a customer with happy customers.

Compare these values—sustainable and humane—and see that a culture for better software can be realized.

The goal of the software makers at the agile-ux retreat was to find a common ground and nurture a unified culture: Some people confessed to being less than optimistic. What resulted was larger than agile and user experience. What emerged was a new normal and a higher benchmark for collaboration.

Through over 20 hours of discussions, panels, and exercises the group of approximately 30 software makers made a sinusoidal, divergent-convergent discussion pattern. Words like trust, solidarity, interdisciplinary, and fractal were shouted or uttered. Concepts such as us vs. them thinking, and overcoming the momentum of tradition were argued or pondered.

The values thus far are as follows…

Disciplines over roles
Roles split teams into silos that split goals into task segregation, encouraging specialist behaviors and us vs. them culture.

Effectiveness over efficiency
By teaching and learning effective software practices, efficiency naturally follows.

Product over process
By emphasizing process, the goal to produce and deliver product is overlooked.

Shared responsibility over sole responsibility
When there is something worth doing, it must be done. Ask for help when the task is unfamiliar or unwieldy.

Attendees are still trying to come to terms with what the progress they made means for the whole community.

I believe perfection as a concept is just an illusion. And not so much an illusion really, but a perception. A perception derived from witnessing many individual elements harmonizing in a way that it becomes difficult to imagine a way to make improvements.

Perfection is simplicity: Nothing to add, nothing to take away. In this regard, perfection should not require an inordinate amount of energy to achieve. Combine the right elements and arrange them in such a way that your intended result is achieved.

How do we know which elements to gather? How do we arrange them? By increasing our understanding: The better our understanding of an environment and its members, the better our chances of making the right choices.