Book – Intersection: How Enterprise Design Bridges the Gap between Business, Technology, and People

Intersection 1st Edition

NOTICE: This post is NOT about the content or idea of the book, but about what it remind me of. Sorry for the post title — it’s just a teaser and origin of thoughts.

Came across this book lately. Haven’t read too far. The scope seems broad (it is) and the goal is brave. I’d recommend you to read it since few of its kind exists even nowadays.

It reminds me of the ever-subtle correlation (if any) between the company culture and the “successfulness (whatever that means)” of design and, ultimately,  business. Your company is what you are, and your company culture who you are.

While we, the designers, are struggling to earn more respect from higher-level execs/stakeholders, shouldn’t we also consider how not to alienate/estrange the rest of the world while gradually establishing UX as a field/discipline?

Just like management, design is here to help everyone, and that’s why we’re struggling in a business world context — we’re doing our work within our boundaries, it’s just that our boundaries overlap with that of everyone of you, and that drawing the fine line is almost always challenging in the world of limited contexts.

I’ve seen startups where the founders respect UX and the UX guys can and manage to earn respect from all teams/departments. The culture enables UX to help, and the benefits that results in enhances the culture. Win-win. One factor I deem critical is that most people in a company actually get the idea of UX — its role, its scope, how it works, and how to benefit from it. From that on it’s like heaven (well, not really, you know…).

The so called UX Design (let’s just assume, for now, that the concept covers everything — graphic design, interaction design, UI design, etc. you name it) overlaps with everyone, every team, every department, every stakeholder (well you could disagree with all that), just because it has the potential to help each from probably different aspects and on different levels.

Designers are constantly dealing with intersections. An art work is probably a self-indulging one-way communicative effort (from its artist to its viewer), while design in a business context a wishful, subtly falsifiable two-way challenge.

Hopefully that book could give me some more ideas about dealing with that challenge — the challenge of being at Nexus.

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