I have two thoughts about this that have been percolating for a while now and I need to bring up @ director's soon:

1) First, in all this talk about UX vs Creative and "is UX creative," I've noticed that, generally speaking, UX people are using "Creative' as synonymous with "design." This clouds the issue unnecessarily I think. Because yes, a good UX designer can probably make a pretty good page design. But Creative, when it comes to what we do is so much more than that. I think the best way to think of it is with our "funny" projects like, say, the Chicken or Beer Cannon. Strategy and UX have their part, but it's really the creative's job to "bring the funny." Like it's the creative's job to say "the best way to tackle this problem on the web is by building a cannon, shooting beer out of it, filming it and putting it on youtube." User Experience doesn't really think that way. Or even let's remove the funny - "the best way to meet the client's marketing needs on the web is by making a series of educational videos" or "the best way to achieve this goal is to make a 3D simulation that looks as good as sim city." There's a whole realm of creative in what we do - finding the best internet tactic to stimulate the audience - that lives outside of UX or strategy. The "make the stoners laugh" part of it. The "inspire parents to take action" part of it. The "have someone shed a tear" part of it.

2) Secondly! I am starting to think that while we still have departments, people can be in many of them. I'm thinking maybe we take a "merit-badge" approach. Where directors institute training regimens or qualifications, and employees then train or qualify to be a UX, Strategy, Rails, PHP resource, etc. It would be murder on our poor resourcing app and pipeline, but I'm starting to think it's the best way to a) ensure that each discipline is rigorously applied and tended to, and b) keep us from getting too silo'd.

I think you've hit upon one of the hardest things about scaling up an agency from a small team environment to one that can handle huge projects and accounts. When the company is small and people wear many hats, it's easy for one person to have a solid vision of a project. Once you start trying to scale that up, you end up having that same person try to delegate their vision while being involved less and less in individual project decisions.

I think most people's knee jerk reaction is to create these different departments and try to partition the creative process into individual components and then hope that the final product resembles the original plan after everyone has done their part. The problem with this is the person doing that oversight is usually someone very busy that has their hands in multiple projects.

Projects of that size seem like they would benefit from having a sort of 'Project Czar' that is responsible for the overall 'experience' of the project. I suppose that whether or not that person is the UX person or the Creative Director or whatever I think depends on what sort of project it is.

1) Kicker is a product-focused design firm, not a web design firm (I think -- their site is a bit scanty on the info). "Experience design" is a web term, for good reason: the web is an endless sandbox, and web designers really are in charge of creating the user's experience, soup to nuts. There's no physical world to interfere, and yes, experience is the product.

A product on the other hand, that exists in the real world -- a cell phone, a keyboard -- comes with built-in, real-world design limitations. There is no endless sandbox, and "experience design" becomes a bit too expansive a term to have real application in that context. So I can see why Saffer objects to its use in his product-design-driven sphere, but I think it's possibly a bit of a cheap shot.

2) I believe that various UX roles can be rolled into a single employee, of course. But is that efficient? I don't think so. I think that roles should be broken out as much as it makes sense to do so given the ability to work simultaneously toward a project's completion. If a visual designer and an IA can work side-by-side, and it saves time to do so, then yes, they should remain specialists, because it creates efficiency. At the same time, if people working together understand each other's competencies and can speak the same language, then it kills off the dangers of being "siloed."

First off, compared to other places I've worked TBG is incredibly open when it comes to who does what. Sure the titles don't always match the entirety of an individual's responsibility, but as long as we all know that, does it really matter? I guess I mean I think it's important to make a distinction between changing titles for the sake of changing titles and changing actual workflow. Take some work as of late as an example, while we all sat in our separate "divisions", I never felt like any of us were not completely open to each others' feedback and expertise, no matter what area that feedback may fall in to. Does that make sense? (I'm not sure I'm articulating myself all that well.)

I also like Rick's idea (a lot). I've always felt like it's the role of the head of a department to educate the company on how to do what they do so that they can bring it with them every day to work. At the end of the day, I think some specialization, but as I mentioned in the company meeting, I think that at the end of the day it's really helpful for some deliverables to have the expert thinking about it and working on it.

Brier's comment on an individual's entire contribution to a project is imperative in this day and age. Especially for the small firms and single contractors. As a designer, I have to wear many hats and am forced to learn every facet of an experience to make sure all the pieces fall into place. Whether it be designing the web presence, creating and capturing the video elements that make up a portion of the experience, or creating the physical product that a client needs to present to the public. The point is, with the more hats you wear, the better your understanding and capability of delivering on the overall product...from start to finish. Specialists are great and necessary, but as a UX or Creative, you have to be widely exposed to the different mediums available and at least have the knowledge to speak with the experts in those fields in order to provide the best possible experience for your client's customer. Obviously, money plays a role in the extent of the experience you can deliver, but that's another topic.

I think it would be a great strength to a company if everyone knew a little about what everyone did. I believe in the sharing of knowledge and that you get rewarded by doing so, whether with clients or your co-workers.

Rick, I think saying that "finding the best internet tactic to stimulate the audience" lives outside of UX and Strategy would bring a bunch of jeers and boos from people that fall in those categories. :-P ... Strategy and UX people are as interested in beer cannons as they are in site architectures. At least the ones at TBG! Boo putting people in buckets, yay celebrating their specialties and expertise.

The POV I am arriving at is that "creative" and "user experience" are concepts that are such a part of TBG's DNA that they don't warrant silos. The skills of dreaming up an idea like a beer cannon, and turning requirements/research into a vision are skills that everyone at TBG who is "making stuff" should be involved in.

I love the merit badge idea Rick.

Basically, the sentiment of share knowledge, learn about a broad range of topics, and go deep in one area is what I am hearing consensus on. I think the place to focus on is how this translates into the way we work, not what buckets we put people into. Enter the process discussion!

It's interesting, I've been getting a lot of flack lately for "departments." And I think the merit badge metaphor really exemplifies how I've always thought of it. I never thought of it as silo'd. But I did very much think that the roles of tech, ux, and strategy deserved as methodical and careful attention as we gave creative, so I put them all on equal footing. I also wanted a "director" to call attention to that discipline's needs at the company level. From day one we had people straddling multiple departments (Kenji as Tech and Creative, Ruby and Kristen as Creative and UX, most of the Flash peeps as tech and creative, Kim especially). It was always more about enshrining the discipline in our principals.

Merit Badges, man, Merit Badges. Let's talk about it @ directors.

BTW this is the best comment thread ever.

No overt or enforced bucketing has occurred here, actually. Instead, it's been a by-product of scaling to support our popularity and taking on more ambitious work to ensure we (ADHD types) stay interested in what we're doing. Scaling is noble, being popular and consistent and respected is noble, and building sort of specialized hot spots (directors) around which anyone in the shop can drift and learn and add influence is really, really noble.

We've suffered from a classic online mistake, though in the offline world. We sort of set it up under the "if you build it they will come" ethic. We assumed that, under heavy load, folks would still maintain their full-stack knowledge and float around freely because that's the ideal. What happens, though, is that people often get so deep into a project and into solving problems in a certain domain that they become specialists, if only for a short time (12 weeks or so). A strong jQuery coder will feel it's best for his team for him to take on all the Javascript work, and will let someone who is a great graphic designer handle all the UX. It's defensive in a way, and makes a lot of sense. Hell, I want my surgeries performed by great specialists. At the same time, though - I don't want a surgeon with knowledge of only one organ, perhaps fuzzy knowledge of others. Great, competent doctor first. Specialist second. Gotta keep both parts growing, though!

That's where we (and our industry!) can explore processes that focus around problems being solved by groups comprised of more cross-disciplinary teams.

Take something as simple as classic kick-off questions, "Who is the design contact for the project? The tech contact?"

In those simple questions, without meaning to, paths can be carved out that separates individuals and identifies them by their core competency instead of by their true role: Barbarian.

As long as we continually stress that we're not an ad agency, or a software company, or a "Web design firm" or "Robert's design shop" but rather Makers of User Experience, we can keep that fluidity that exists when we're under moderate load and make sure everybody understands the real work product.