Creating a design identity

A note to the youngsters at the Department of Design IIT Guwahati.

Design Identity: i am not sure if we need one. I would be perfectly happy if the world says that DOD is a place from where its not exactly designers that graduate but gamechangers. What makes us different - each one of use believe that we have superpowers (the JEE gave us those). Add to this a designers perspective, that ability to not just analyse and solve practical problems but to be a dreamer, to be able to visualise a bright and wonderful future. Our USP is that we have it in us to be the integration point between various domains. We need to know as much of as many things as we can. So for those in college, i would say 'Go Play'. Don't restrict yourself. Read. Explore. Collaborate with people from other departments. Create insane ideas. insane prototypes. Check out things like MIT media labs if you want inspiration. Your IIT tag will get you a job, so don't worry too much about that. But you will never get back that college time. Create as many insane things as you can, try to expand the boundaries of your knowledge and with that of all others around you as well. And soon when enough of us tread this path of exploration, we will create an very unique identity for ourselves.

How should designers tackle when the developer says - "No, this feature cannot be implemented"

Answer to the question recently asked by a junior on a forum (putting it here so that i have it for my future reference)

there are 2-3 ways to about this .. 1) you go about in a polite way, give them examples of where else it is done as well as maybe samples you find on the internet to do similar things .. make sure you just give them hints and not complete solution .. if the developer is one who is proud of his coding he wont take complete solutions and would like to research it himself .. if he is one who likes ready baked stuff then he will be all ears if you give him references where he can find similar stuff .. 2) you try to figure out what is it stopping him from implementing it? Is it is time, or the effort or he just cant understand the need for the feature or he cant understand how to implement it. If its pure lazyness then you cant do much .. get it implemented by somebody else. If its the complexity, then it becomes your duty to break that requirement down into easy consumable chunks that the developer can work upon .. let it be known that the development can be iterative .. get out a rough version with some thing working and then slowly improve upon it. In the end it depends on the developer you r dealing with, there is no one type of them. Each has his own incentive that drives him to work .. figure that out and you might have a better chance of conving them ..