Construction vs. Design

I recently read a somewhat old essay by Scott Berkun, Why software sucks, and the discussion about Construction vs. Design left me thinking.

In essence, the Construction viewpoint starts from the small pieces and tries to build up a vision, whereas the Design process begins with a wide perspective and tries to find the pieces needed to fulfill it.

In some way I think that this can be compared greatly to Google and Apple, and maybe to Android and iOS. While Google has great tools and services for a quite large number of tasks, it lacks a grand vision and the interactions are sometimes complicated. Apple, on the other hand, begins with the user experience and slowly but steadily tries to accomplish it, although some features may be missing.

This is very idealistic, of course, but maybe the background is the fight between Engineering (we do it because we can) and Product Management (to complement the user experience we have to do it).

Personally I’m making the transition from Construction to Design, but now that I think of it I’m realizing that I started this journey some time ago.