I got stuck in the EDA mindset again. In the engineering / stat world (the design world, I think less so), everyone always seems to be under a quickly upcoming deadline, so there’s a need to get (good) things out as fast as possible — no time for conflict and a need to come to a fast consensus.

As a result, design seems to suffer the most. It’s often an afterthought in the technical fields, which can be a problem when you want to start getting people to pay attention to you. However, a design piece lacking the ever so important backend seems to leave people asking, “It’s pretty, but what’s the point?”

When there’s a bit more time though, a bit of clash will usually be good — the point of collaboration :)

… somewhere at the edge of my mind.. part of me thinks, theres something very interesting in the tensions and tug of war, between different the extremities and perceived priorities in the areas of practice and specialism you mention. I dont think we experienced much conflict working on ‘humanflows’, because we were for the most part on the same page and could communicate with each other- and lets face it, it helped to have a statistician who was engineering and design aware and Miguel the designer who could code and deal with cleaning up data!

But conflict and confusion can also sometimes lead to quite creative results! we were missing proper punch up there! ;)

anyhow in all seriousness, I think you also make a very strong argument here for a domain of practice which is design, stat and engineering aware (im still gutted I cant find a stat dept in our university) . So, I wont be surprised if someone is reading this thinking, why don’t we get a multidisciplinary postgrad course with a view towards recruiting designers, statisticians and engineers!