Design is a tool, not just a deliverable
Great comment from Henning Fritzenwalder, a User Experience Architect based in Germany. He's talking about design and visualisation and the power of creating tangible, visual artefacts to help frame discussions about development and functional specification
"All development lifecycles based on the waterfall principle have a common shortcoming: The moment of truth, when all stakeholders can check the visual results with their expectations comes at the end / too late to change anything big.There's a way to overcome this situation and improve the design results. First, you need to agree on this: Design is a service that transforms logic concepts, expressed in flows and ambiguous words into a clear, non-ambiguous, tangible visual vision.
Second: If design is a service that helps to turn something ambiguous into something clear and well-defined, it can help stakeholders to agree on a common vision and is no longer only the result of the process, but a part of it. Third: If design can help stakeholders to agree on strategy and requirements, each step of the lifecycle needs to be accompagnied by a visual draft that visualizes the strategies and requirements. So that along with the final requirements you'll have a final design"
Second: If design is a service that helps to turn something ambiguous into something clear and well-defined, it can help stakeholders to agree on a common vision and is no longer only the result of the process, but a part of it. Third: If design can help stakeholders to agree on strategy and requirements, each step of the lifecycle needs to be accompagnied by a visual draft that visualizes the strategies and requirements. So that along with the final requirements you'll have a final design"
Beautifully put.
Here's Henning's Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=8565500&authToken=K0f3&authType=name
