People think they know everything just because they also do something aesthetics related.

nah this applies to engineers too, possibly more so. I don't have contact with many architect-architects, and I know a lot of them are irritating people, but most of the professors/guest speakers of my engineering classes were all about how engineers are the smartest people in the world and if everything was run by engineers (using logic and common sense) the world would perfect and run as smoothly as an industrial engineered drive thru

landscape architects also butt heads with grey engineers at times, because we have different ideas about what is important, and the engineers sometimes feel that just because they can do the calculations and drafting, they can design just as well as the LAs. I imagine it's the same scenario with web design: as an engineer I can program it myself in a second, so why should I pay this web designer to sit around and worry about silly aesthetics? of course web design is about more than aesthetics, as is any form of architecture, but that's something people often forget

the internet would be better as a purely textual affair, with images and media downloaded and viewed separately

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Can one not be an engineer, where, they look at aesthetics, not as some silly illogical thing that just makes things pretty, but a function in of it's self? One that has a positive influence on the user's mind? Thus a logical thing to have?

oh yeah, I doubt very many of them think aesthetics is useless. but some have varying opinions of how valuable aesthetics are in contrast to more engineer-like things, eg getting that retention basin to hold x cubic feet of water, regardless of things like aesthetics, effect on the the site layout, and habitat. and I'm sure others are totally on the same page as any halfway competent designer (knowing what goes into the engineering of the project is part of being an effective designer), but we never hear about them. we only hear about the grey engineers who wanna get water off the streets and into the combined sewers as quickly as possible

So I'm still in that habit and it is so ingrained in my mind, that now the look I used to apathetically go for, I now see as bizarrely appealing... The "I don't give a fuck, I'm comfortable in this" look.

you're probably the first 'casual-dressing' person I've seen realize this. a lot of people still latch on to the idea that they don't care how they look because that's shallow and something only celebrity-worshipers or indoctrinated materialists do. obv there's some truth to that, but what they don't realize is that they probably do have their own style, it's just not something that the media tells us qualifies as "a style" or "caring how you look"

Also, I've always thought ease-of-use/interface design was supposed to be logical (just a different context of logic). So a really good engineer should be able to do both function and interface.

probably, to some extent. the opposite can be true too. but 9 times out of 10 they won't be able to do it as well as someone who was trained in/primarily works in that field

the problem with software is that the engineering of it usually constitutes a mathematical kind of design. the common approaches to designing software interfaces that are taught at most universities are complete bullshit and rely primarily on a combination of badly applied cognitive psychology and software engineering dogma. it is in essence an attempt to turn design for computers into an engineering task. approaches that treat it wholly as a design task will only succeed if they develop appropriate concepts. software is too diverse for a concept that doesn't essentially constitute a programming language. so domain-specific approaches to design must be developed. at the moment, most software designers are not aware of the impact the tools they make have on users, particularly on their users' jobs. my friend is writing his masters thesis on a related topic and mentioned a paper that argues that software can be treated as a historical narrative of work. i think that there's some truth in that. this guy called lev manovich has argued that this implies that people who work with computational tools should be able to program software - otherwise their jobs are told by the people that employ the programmers - the toolmakers. i ain't read it in full yet but here's some other thing he wrote http://computationalculture.net/article/inside-photoshop that may be of interest to anyone that gives half a shit about the content of this post (lol nobody.)

summary: sometimes design can get all mixed up. especially in computers. i suspect that it's an insufficient construct.

dietcoke: here you go http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_%28web_browser%29
i use this when my graphical thing breaks. it will make your internet dreams come true.

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True festive spirit!!

yeah bigs, that's kind of the trend landscape architecture (dunno about building architecture) has already followed. a decent la school will teach you the engineering stuff, because engineering is generally inseparable from design. right now we're doing horizontal and vertical road alignment by hand in a grading class and also designing a sewershed

it probably all started because the suburban model is something incredibly easy to replicate, so easy that they eventually started cutting designers out of the picture in order to save money. if you live in the US, you've probably seen the result: places designed for numbers, eg capacities, quotas, dollars. the trend is changing, as more and more devs will only give projects to collaborative firms that employ people to do both design and engineering work. let's not be sentimental, what it essentially comes down to is that businesses and developers have started to realize that saving money in design and construction isn't actually the most cost-effective practice.

I dunno if that sort of collaboration would work with software tho. probably need someone who is a professional in design and also knows a lot of programming stuff, working with someone/a group that will take care of the more advanced programming stuff like cross-platforming or whatever idrk

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