Bulldozer00's Blog

As I continue to slowly inhale Fred Brooks‘s book, “The Design Of Design“,  I’m giddily uncovering  all kinds of diamonds in the rough. Fred states:

“If designers use a structured annotation or software tool during design it will restrict the ease of having vague ideas, impeding conceptual design.”

Ain’t that the truth? Don’t those handcuffing “standard document templates, processes, procedures, work instructions” that you’re required to follow to ensure quality (lol!) frustratingly constrain you from doing your best work?

Along the same lines, Fred hits another home run in my ballpark (which is devoid of adoring and paying fans, of course):

“I believe that a generic diagramming tool, with features such as automatic layout of trees, automatic rerouting of relationship arrows, and searchable nodes, is better suited to (design) tree capture. Microsoft Visio or SmartDraw might be such a choice.”

Man, this one almost made me faint and lose consciousness. I live, eat, and breath “Visio”. Every picture that you’ve seen in this blog and every design effort that I undertake at work starts with, and ends with, Visio – which is the greatest tool of expression I’ve ever used. I’ve tried “handcuffers” like Artisan Studio and Enterprise Architect as software design aids, but they were too frustratingly complex and constraining to allow me to conjure up self-satisfying designs.

All designs must eventually be constrained so that they can be built and exploited for profit. But in order to constrain, one must be unconstrained. How’s that for a zen-like paradox?