Enter the chief design officer!: hail to the chief!

(MAYA design), for pulling together a great number of sessions and activities for practitioners. Sixty-one of 144 " Contemporary Trend " submissions were tagged in the submission system as " Design, " which is double the number submitted as design for CHI2006. Of those, acceptances included 18 experience reports, eight interactiv-ity (demos), and three interactive sessions (panels). If you came to CHI looking for design material this year, we hope you were not disappointed. Tuesday's offerings included a panel organized by Richard Anderson titled, " Moving UX into a Position of Corporate Influence: Whose Advice Really Works? " Much to our surprise, the panelists all seemed to scoff at the idea Richard posed: the need for a chief design officer or chief user experience officer or an alternate C-level design presence. One commentator said, " The last thing you want is the board dictating the colors or fonts or other designs. " The panelists here were completely off base. The chief design officer (CDO) concept is meant to avoid this very thing. A CDO should set the design strategy for the company and make sure it stays on course. Being a C-level officer, the CDO has enough clout to keep boardroom design from taking place. Having worked for many large companies, we have never seen an example of boardroom design that hasn't resulted in poor usability, or worse—spending millions of dollars in implementing and then de-implementing unprofessional designs. All of us, at one time or another, have resisted (or will resist) design-on-the-spot, especially where both the product and your career may be negatively affected! A CDO can successfully advocate for design when design is ignored, diminished , or defeated by competing engineering , marketing, and other legitimate software-development issues. Looking at the schematic justification of the C-level design officer, Bill Buxton makes the following analogies [1]: (We added " chief design officer, " Bill had a question mark.) company does not have a CDO, then it is not taking design seriously. It's not the title; it's the role. Is there someone in your company who makes the final call on design philosophy and resourcing? If you work at a corporation or a company large enough to have a design team, they need executive-level support. Quality, on all fronts, costs money. Quality engineering is expensive when it is high caliber. Quality design, also, takes time, money, and resources to fit with …