As we have already discussed, HCI and designing software are a team endeavor. The reality is it is more like a league of teams all competing but working toward similar goals. All the companies and individual HCI designers, software developers, project managers, and so on are all part of a collective community. One big family. We might occupy our own little specific space of expertise or software knowledge but when it comes down to it, we all make software and we all work on the same teams.
In the past, and in some instances today, our communities created walls between the design (art) and the code (technical) aspects of solving software problems. Unfortunately in some cases, it has gone so far inside the industry that designers and developers don't actually work together on solving problems, but rather lob solutions back and forth from department to department. We as an industry created management ideas, such as the Waterfall...