June 8th, 2006

Is the ThoughtWorks mind the creative mind?

  • Thursday, 8 June, 2006
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The guys over the fence in the media and advertising world are seeing a paradigm shift away from focussing upon the narrow “message” of a campaign to the broader “user experience” that encompasses the whole brand, not just a flashy graphic. This requires the “creative minds” to broaden their horizons. One such creative mind has created a picture that illustrates this.

The creative mind

This is a good way of thinking when attacking an IT problem. Not just focussing upon implementation detail, but the whole user experience. It means broadening the mind beyond the analytical. In addressing IT problems, developing greater “curiousity” and “expressiveness” is not a giant leap. But sesuality? Can developers ever have a sensual mind?

Recent experiences suggest so. Once a Dev has been hypnotised with a bit of web 2.0, emotional design seems to flow through their arteries. They “seek to satisfy all the senses. Aesthetics, beauty and form are driving forces…” That is they get all gradient-fills and curves and funky Ajax gizmos…

If it takes one man 3 days to dig a hole…

  • Thursday, 8 June, 2006
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I was talking to someone working on the Kings Cross regeneration project and he told a sorry tale that has a certain resonance with IT projects.

So they were drilling a big hole that had to be drilled and they came across a major sewer. Now someone should’ve known the sewer was down there but clearly they didn’t and the hole drillers had a problem on their hands. You can’t drill through a sewer, the sewer had to be moved. And it is no easy task moving a major London sewer, it requires major bypass surgery. Costs necessarily spiral – it’s a new project building a new sewer and with the hole unable to be drilled the timescales of the regeneration project slip.

But that’s not the end of the story. Apparently they start digging a new trench to lay the new sewer bypass and it is by a building full of business people who like to have their office windows open and clearly don’t take kindly to all the noise and dust from the trench being dug. And work on the new sewer grinds to a halt as negotiations take place on what to do. They have the windows open because it is hot weather and they have no air conditioning. Time slips further and costs escalate even more as the solution is agreed. Until the contractors have installed air-conditioning in the building no work can continue on digging the trench, no work can continue on bypassing the sewer and no work can continue on digging the hole.