I didn’t mention this in my post, but I used to work for Intel, where I spent most of my years as a programmer.

I can sympathize with the positions that programmers are put in and completely agree that the communication during product design must NOT be hierarchical.

The more I think about it your use of the word hierarchical highlights your concerns that interaction designers not be placed higher, organizationally, than programmers. If that was your concern, then yes, I did get that from the article.

I think your reaction to Interaction Design as it came out in the article is understandable and, while cautionary, not overly reactionary. I’m glad you had the discussion with Alan Cooper.

I still don’t think Extreme Programming is a viable solution if your goal is to create a good end-to-end product design/development process, but I also wouldn’t immediately attack the suggestion of its use. It addresses some valid concerns by a very important part of the design/development team.

http://www.info-arch.org/hypermail/sigia-l/0201/0399.html

One contributor is a developer who’s done a lot of XP. His comments (about defining design, among other things) have been the best thing on sigia in 6 months.