Quote: “To a large extent Beck and Cooper spend most of their time in this conversation talking past each other. Cooper nails the design problem when he points out that we don't have anyone operating in the role that a real-world architect adopts in bridging between the vague and ill-formed needs of a user and the engineering constraints on a builder. While we talk about technology architects, there really aren't very many out there.
What we have instead are some good general contractors trying to fill the shoes of an architect. But contractors are rooted in the world of construction. They aren't trained to and don't see the more complex objectives that the end user is trying to meet.”
Comment: I've seen this same architectural analogy used in Instructional Design, i.e. I'm like an architect in that I understand construction and know how to talk to the builders and the to clients, so I can mediate between the two. I even have preferred building styles, but can pretty much handle other ways of doing things too.
The interesting thing to me is that I've never seen much research attention paid to this role. [Serious Instructional Technology]