Design is not about simply manifesting the idea in a usable or pretty way. It’s about exploring a conceptual space through the making process. A successful design process may result in a completely new approach and direction for a project. That only happens through an iterative, discovery-led making process. Especially in Interaction Design, where we as designers, truly “see” it only when we interact with a working prototype.

An example of this misunderstanding of design was much of the criticism of the recent Microsoft Office future vision video. The argument was, why is Microsoft wasting time making things like this, when they should be shipping real product? To me, that completely misses the point of design explorations. How do you turn a hugh ship like Microsoft to go in new directions? Design is one way of doing this.

Unfortunately, much of the Microsoft video is bad interaction design (not to mention that, apparently, in the future there are only frighteningly perfect, rich, mostly white people who fit stereotypes). But the design is what we should be critiquing, not the fact that at least Microsoft is trying to look into the future and rethink how we interact.

One last point. A place where the ideas of agile development and design can coincide is in the making of prototypes. Far too often, the fidelity of prototypes is too high, when a better approach would be to get something done quickly, and in a rough state. This way, the iterative cycle can go faster. This is perhaps one of the biggest mistakes that Microsoft made. The potential design ideas in the future vision video were lost in the high production value and glitzy motion graphics.