Design Files - The HiFi/LoFi Problem
Listening to: Innuendo - Queen
The next few posts are me just getting ideas out in the open before I forget them. I promise they won’t be as crazy as my lawn mowing tales, but you’ll need to grin a bear things for a little while.
Design files really tire me. They consume a vast amount of my time. But like some sort high-maintenance relationship I stick with them because the reward is great. The big issues are around interrogation. Technically - the vast majority of my job is looking at a file and asking two seemingly simple questions:
- How long are the lines?
- What and where are the areas?
The amount of effort you need to go to to get that information is mind boggling - but pretty valuable once you have it. Once you’ve asked and answered those questions you are able to start asking and answering some interesting business questions.
Having spent two years doing this I have come to the conclusion that this situation suffers from a HIFI/LOFI problem. A good design file needs to be a HIgh FIdelity store of information and it needs to handle some pretty hard-core issues - like lines tangent to a circle:
Looks simple, but it ain’t and it’s important. That sort of stuff that guarantees the hand-gasms you get when using an iPod. So this is a necessary evil of the space - the file formats need to be hardcore (created by monkeys smarter than me)… but that hardcore nature really gets in the way of creating vital and valuable business systems. That’s why Sequoia and SAP are sinking cash into Right Hemisphere - there is gold in them thar’ files. But the thing is business systems really only need a LOw FIdelity version of the data. As I see it the fidelity requirements of a design file look like this:
The above process is a gross simplification of the product design-manufacturing lifecycle. A product gets designed, business stuff happens and the product gets made. Pragmatically the hifi requirements (in fetching blue) are at the ends of the process - when you’re creating the design and when the final product gets made. The other stuff you can get away with having a lofi version of the data.
“So what! Stop you’re whinging,” I hear you say. Fair cop. The ’so what’ lies in the potential of “what next”. Creating a solution to this LOFI/HIFI dichotomy has a real potential to unlock some really interesting innovation in the manufacturing and product spaces.
You can try and tackle the problem by saying ‘one file format only’ but culturally, that doesn’t fly too well and you then need to get onto the treadmill of file format support, which given the plethora of closed file formats is very very painful. It would be really powerful if there was a way of recognizing the separate requirements…
