Separating team or a whole learner team?

Question

I have a presentation about "Trust and E-commerce" which was about how to implement trust in E-commerce sites like alibaba.com.

I believe that knowing how and why we should implement trust, is important to "whole" team. I believe knowing that how to build it, will change how you will code, Although you have a "programmer" position instead of "designer".

There, my teacher has this struggle that a programmer is a programmer, and a designer is a designer, and like security, as a concept, you should separate the code and the design.

I feel that security and trust are both concepts, but as security is seems to be more important, it has its own way for thinking.

My question is, should any one know about design, even implementors? Should we learn everyone thinks and behave in this manner, or we should separate our team to "thinkers" and "doers"?

Answer 1

A role-based approach to software design and development would probably support separation between the "doer" and the "thinker" as a way to efficiency. It is somehow a Fordist approach to processes, emphasizing specialization and standardization.

On the other side, the cross-functional or collaborative approach has a different understood, assuming that the programming activity also requires conceptual thinking, creativity and perspective (see: Brad frost on "Development is design").

When adopting agile project management frameworks, team members often have a shared knowledge of design and development and even business challenges; this help them staying motivated and grow their systemic skills.

In modern product development there is an established trend that advocates the creation of small cross-functional teams instead of mono-disciplinary "silos". You can find some references here: Lean UX

Even without going "lean", which also depends on the size, type and culture of your organization, collaboration among design and developers is generally regarded as a fruitful combination, endorsed by big players such as google, facebook and IBM.

Answer 2

Of course you are only talking about visual design when you describe Designers. However designers do not own "design" and anyone can come up with a good idea which can be inspired by something.

In fact everybody involved in building something does design in one form or another, so in building software even programmers design how their code will work.

The days of designers chucking designs over the fence for others to follow are long gone.

The best design occurs when multiple people and disciplines collaborate together.