As a term almost devoid of meaning, "redesign" is a crutch that leads to disastrous results.
Redesigns originate in the hazy concerns and political machinations of senior leaders, coalesce around poorly defined problem statements, gain steam around hopes of "fixing everything once and for all," and conclude with Pyrrhic celebrations of what are ultimately a sad bag of cosmetic changes.
Along the way, agencies get fat and rich, in-house teams get crushed, and users suffer.
And because redesign efforts yield so little institutional learning, the whole sad mess gets repeated every few years.
In his session, Lou Rosenfeld will argue instead for the rational and cost-effective alternative of incremental change: tuning sites over time, rather than "fixing" them all at once. Over and over again.
