Many designers define their practice as professional problem solving. I’d like to take that a step further and say that it is decontextualized, generalized, or abstract problem solving. This is because design is not tied to any domain or subject matter.

Ironically though, there is no such thing as a decontextualize, generalized or abstract problem. Problems by defintion must emerge from a particular domain or subject matter. So design is a generalized problem solving endeavor yet there is not such thing as a generalized problem–there are only specific problems.

As a result many design methods intend to gather domain knowledge in order to bridge this gap between the general and the specific. This then begs the question: is it better to have a subject matter expert with some design knowledge or a design expert with some domain knowledge?

This question maps directly to proejct resourcing. With limited resoruces what is the best balance bewteen domain and desgin expertise? And on what does this balancing act depend?

I think many mature designers have an innate (and usually non-selfish) sense of how to manage this balance. However I have not yet seen anything more concrete on the matter outside of my own experience. This becomes a problem when dealing with entreched disciplines like marketing and engineering who tend to have many narrow preconceived notions (well, don’t we all?) about problem solving and are more easily persuaded by more objective information than the designer’s experience.

Oh and merry Christmas. Now I need toget back to playing The Movies (its a video game simulation for those who haven’t heard of it).