Campbell Craig :: The Irish Duck

Designer/Developer, what am I? Kinda both really.

// February 17th, 2010 // rambling, web development

For those that are in the industry, know that Adobe had their Refresh 2010 last week. Well, from what I can see the industry, thanks to a number of companies including Adobe and Microsoft, has moved into skill segmentation—Designers and Developers—and you have every right to expect these guys to understand each other because they will be working in a collaborative environment. A Developer needs to understand what the Designer does, and his or her unique language, and vice versa. Post Secondary education, on the other hand, produces either one or the other because… that is what we do. They “train up” specialists that are either really great designers or amazing coders. The students spend a few years learning their craft in a rather cloistered environment and are rarely exposed to the skills of the other person in the equation. Which begs the question: Do design schools need to expose their students to code in a digital universe, and do code-centric schools need to introduce a design element into their way of doing things?

This isn’t a frivolous question. Adobe and Microsoft are developing some amazing tools that are slowly but surely moving what we do from the browser to the desktop. They are leading the charge into a web universe that is “rich” in every sense of the word and, as devices take hold, you can bet that your clients are going to start asking why you are charging them twice to develop a web application and another version for a mobile phone. We are living in an industry where “Standards”, “Ajax”, “Flex”, and “Spry” are neither adjectives nor cleaning products. While all of this is going on in your day-to-day business, educators are having real issues keeping up with you, let alone addressing the “Designer/Developer” question.

How they resolve it, though, has the potential of becoming a huge issue because students coming out of the universities have a skill set that sometimes doesn’t meet your current needs, and most likely won’t be able to meet your future needs either. I can see that there is a growing disconnect between the skills being taught in the classroom and the skills you need to possess in the “real world”. Don’t get me wrong, I am pointing out our experience not to rub it in your faces, but to get you thinking. What do you guys think should universities do for an industry that is also figuring out how this collaborative/multidisciplinary approach to Designer/Developer workflow fits into their business models?