"Designer Engineer" Skepticism

there is something uniquely great and advantageous about ignorance.

ignoring norms, ignoring experience, ignoring assumptions about what "is possible".

this is why I am skeptical of the "Designer Engineer":

we need designers to be free to imagine and create without the bias of feasibility constraints.

it is what pushes boundaries - especially at the edge of innovation.

An engineer’s role is to calibrate the designer’s vision with reality, and problem solve to make it happen.

The tension between the unbounded imagination of a designer and the practical reality of an engineer is what makes magic happen.

Merging the the designer and the engineer eliminates that tension:

You can either innovate with code and derive design from the way it works, or innovate from design and derive code from the experience. Trying to do both at once constrains you both ways: the designer inherits the constraints of the engineer, or the engineer inherits the constraints of the designer.

You end up with a designer operating within the framework of an IDE.

It's like having a cake with half the sugar - not sweet enough to be satisfying, and not pure enough to be healthy.

(bad analogy, but you get the point)

On an individual level:

Having the skills to be both a designer and engineer can be an advantage, but there is an economic decision to be made: will you invest your time in honing into your craft as a designer, or your expertise as an engineer?

you can do both - but at the cost of compounding.

Perhaps the best way to frame the “Designer Engineer” is not to replace the designer and the engineer, but is to act as a bridge between both, or introduce a new discipline all together.

After all: design is function, and function is code.