Designers with a future do not take the upper hand in the creation process—over developer “code-monkeys.” The Art Director role is undergoing redefinition, as is Art. The new designer wins by productive conversation with developers, writers, and others. Ultimately, their project’s success depends on how well it serves the user. The project must be flexible, living, breathing, and capable of improving its dialog with users, incrementally, over time.
Incremental design has been around for several years, but Rebecca Miller and Savannah Wolf’s invocation of it—in a preview presentation at the April NYC Ruby Women meet up, organized by Chrys Wu and Rachel Ober at Paperless Post—felt like a game-change. Wolf and Miller-Webster are Head of Product Design and Lead Engineer respectively at the Brooklyn-based dating site How About We. They will present Incremental Design at the upcoming Portland, Oregon Railsconf (I counted eight female and and sixty-six male speakers in the roster this year). Miller and Wu are behind Write.Speak.Code. the June 20-22 three-day event at Pace University that addresses the lack of gender diversity in technology fields by helping women with these communication tools.
