Chapter 7. The Design Team
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
This chapter addresses the following questions:
- What is the composition of design teams?
- What are the settings of design teams?
- What is the contribution of each team member throughout the design process, from onset to realization?
People tend to associate designers with the Arts more than with the technical precision of engineering, despite the fact that design disciplines--from architecture to interaction design--require mastery of both domains in equal parts. In academic settings, design departments have been traditionally a part of the art schools, although ironically often viewed there as inferior trades, comparted to the pure artistic mission of the real arts--painting and sculpture.
Opposing this common view of design as somehow inferior to the arts, is the fact that designers since antiquity were expected to...
