Over the last couple days there has been an explosion of writing (well, a few blog posts) about the need for designers to learn some sort of coding. Jared Spool posted Why The Valley Wants Designers That Can Code, Michael Angeles responded on Konigi, and there has been much tweeting and commenting on the topic.

I’d like to take this a step further, and propose that at some point in the near future designers working in technology will need to code.

Apart from the career and team fit aspects of this argument that Jared and Michael put so well, there are aspects of craft that are equally important. As I’ve written before on my sorely neglected personal blog, I firmly believe that in order to do good design the designer must work with their materials (Part 2). We can’t continue to just make pictures and flat representations of the things we’re designing. There is a time in the design process for making pictures, but it should be about generating ideas and refining them. There is no way to know what your web site, app, or other software, will actually be like without making a realistic version of a working interface. I feel that it’s becoming more and more important for the designer to be able to do at least a part of this, especially for the web where the technology is so accessible.

There was a time during the history of web design where this wouldn’t have even been a question. All web designers could code, at least front-end, and often back-end as well. As design for the web and applications has grown more complex we specialized – teams grew and it became less important for the designer to be able to build their design. In that transition I think we lost something. The act of design became too abstract. We stopped getting our hands dirty.

I’m beginning to form an idea of my vision of a complete designer for the 21st century. That sounds awfully pretentious, but I think this is important. To really design 21st century objects thoroughly, thoughtfully, and completely we need to get back to designers as polymaths. We need to understand and be skilled in interaction design, visual design, some level of coding, and possibly even electronics and physical fabrication. Do we all need to do all these things perfectly and equally well? No, there is still room for specialization.. but we have to understand it all and be willing to learn.

To this end we’re instituting a new professional development program here at Normative. For the next few months we’re all taking an hour a day to dig into front-end web and mobile code. We’re going to learn to bring our ideas to life and start designing all the details that are often missed when we just make pictures.