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Comment on "Measuring the Design Process"
by Romme Abesames — Mar 21
I think there is a false dichotomy here and the Einstein argument is not taken fully enough. Einstein exhibited (used) creativity in coming up with his theories but his theories were never accepted or considered good because they were creative. They were accepted because they fit data better than previous ones.

A naive approach of plainly asking people what they want "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." is flawed and has been considered flawed (e.g. http://www.useit.com/papers/focusgroups.html). This is where both design and engineering mindsets can come together and produce something that they by themselves alone cannot.

1) Years of personal and industry-wide inspiration and imagination backed up by data = Solid Principles

2) Solid Principles + Specific Problems + Inspiration = Possibly many candidate solutions

3) Many candidate solutions + data = Sound decision

It seems Bowman and Google cant agree on these "steps":
- Bowman has gone past step 1 and wants Google to take his professional opinion as gospel. Bowman can't accept that step 2 can produce many possible solutions, and grabbing the first that comes to mind is being hasty. And finally Bowman wants to skip #3 altogether.
- Google does not have any good foundation on #1 (solid design principles) and wants to research and prove everything from scratch.
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