Frank Gehry’s interview with Charlie Rose had a nugget for every entrepreneur out there looking to build the next great web product: Plan for precision and fight for design excellence.

Gehry is a deconstructionist who designed, among many other things, the Walt Disney Concert Hall (pictured here).

Architecture and software development have one thing in common — they both require handing off work to teams with very different skill sets. Gehry points out that its in those transitions that design quality suffers:

“The problem I’ve been railing against is that good architecture gets infantalized by the process. The building is designed for the client, the client loves it, but when the client runs out of money they turn to the contractors who in turn say to ‘flatten this wall’ or ‘change this thing’, not knowing why things were designed that way.

So in order to get great design built you need to go through a rigorous process so that by the time it gets to the contractor there is precision, and this precision has been vetted from a cost standpoint so that the preservation of design begins before you begin building.”

- Frank Gehry

We find a similar risk in software development. A designer creates a beautiful mock, but then the developers either don’t understand or misunderstand how to build certain features. In either case, this results in the a discussion about certain features being too costly, and the original design quality suffers. Not good.

The extra effort it takes to write precise specifications will go a long way toward keeping your products great, saving you money, and even hiring the right team!

Charlie Rose | A conversation with architect Frank Gehry

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Tags   charlie rose  Design  disney concert hall  entrepreneurs  frank gehry