Carl Alviani takes a look at the similarities and differences between product designers and software designers--from sharing language and metaphors to teaching each other how to think about projects and prototyping. An exerpt:

I've found over the course of several years, and several conferences and business functions, that if I stop with the first sentence ("I design products."), the next question is often something like "Oh, on what platform?" Distinguishing the design of physical goods from virtual ones is a necessary step, and substituting "consumer goods" doesn't seem to make things any clearer. This isn't a huge problem either, confined as it is to these specific and predictable situations; and designers of the virtual are usually downright charmed to meet someone who does something as quaint as deal with entire atoms, and not just the electrons flowing between them...

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