Helpful Conflation
A diagram showing writing as a subset of designing.
It seems strange that we can sometimes refine ideas by conflating them with other ideas.
I’ve been thinking about two examples this week.
1. Writing = designing
This phrase “Writing is designing,” popularized as the title of an indispensable book by Michael Metts and Andy Welfle, encapsulates an important, long overlooked truth. As Jared Spool has said:
"Design is the rendering of intent."
We can manifest our intent by designing house interiors, building structures, cars, cartoons, and websites. When we define design broadly like this, writing is a subset of designing. We use our (UX) writing skill to render our intent in the communications of a digital product.
This isn't exactly equivalence. We're not really saying that writing and designing are exact synonyms. What we mean is that writing is a type of designing.
2. Content = product
Next we turn to the rampant under-resourcing of content in tech organizations and compare it to the (more} adequate resourcing of engineering teams. We can theorize that the leaders at software companies have a greater understanding of the value of engineering than content. So they organize their product teams by allocating engineers with the necessary skillsets.
Content, on the other hand, is less familiar to tech leaders, and is perceived as less valuable than code. Content-heavy properties have long fallen under the domain of marketing (blogs, email, notifications) or documentation (knowledge bases) so they aren't categorized as software products.
Since the product is the atomic unit of the software company, the content that flows between, through, and from products becomes invisible. And, as a result, under-resourced.
Could we change this by encouraging our companies to define their content as a product?
I like this response Michael Andrews gave when I posed the question on Twitter:
A tweet saying, “Yes, I believe it can be beneficial to embrace widely used corporate process/management frameworks to ensure our initiatives and projects are sustainable and enable them to evolve.
It's really about defining our work in terms that our teams will understand and value.
A diagram showing content as a subset of product
Conflation as connection
In both of these scenarios, we're not creating exact equivalences. We're defining one thing (writing, content) as a subset of something else (designing, product). We're drawing analogies, making connections.
Often in our work we value distinctions. We must slice and dice words to get to the most specific possible meaning.
Distinctions are necessary in our work, but when we want to communicate value outside of our communities, we often have to collapse these distinctions into larger, more understandable categories by connecting them with other familiar ideas.
We have to conflate to be helpful.