Are we friends “Designers”?

Yesterday I had a fantastic time hosting an episode of "Essam Cafe" with Shadi Mokhtar. 

We talked about design, art, Egyptian designer struggle, and the value of working together as a team.

One of the interesting points that Shadi talked about is where does design start? And the impact of changing the organization's order, for instance, what comes first, is it creative and art? is it business? Is it marketing?

The question became apparent when you rephrase the terms we are talking about; the way I see, it was like, "Is it business-centrism, design-centrism, or marketing-centrism.", the conclusion that we have reached is that it is none of those; it is probably when you start from the experience going backward to each function of the organization.

Based on the type of user and what you want to deliver, you start building your organization's units dependency. Sometimes engineering has to take the lead because the problem is technical by nature and needs to be solved on the engineering side first, then moving from there.

We moved on and talked about Pablo Picasso and how a random visit to Pablo Picasso Museum in Barcelona got me closer to art in a way I have never imagined; for me, what I have perceived from the visit is Picasso was an enterprise of one person, he used to do the whole pipeline of art production, which includes a lot of execution details, he invented his agile method that works for him, he used to do MVPs for the ideas he had and build slowly toward what he imagined the final product, he used to break thing to his consumer in a very fascinating way.

One of the things that Shadi talked about was the preception about the brand by asking me to describe a brand in 3 words, and it was a fascinating insight on how I perceive brands and how I See things; it also answers one question for me, why do I use specific brands.

Shadi also talked about the rise of the "gig-economy." and how badly it affects the user experience for lack of consistency and no clear direction for the service or application, the interesting thing is Shadi now work as an independent Product Designer, his thoughts on how he chooses what to work on was very interesting.

We also talked about how engineers and designers work together, and it was mostly finding the sweet spot where both of us enjoy the work we are doing by, for example, "Pairing on features work.", this idea is very good as we always hear about Pair programming, but we never heard about "Engineer and designer pair on something."