Ralph Caplan on the murky term that is “deliverable:”
I don’t remember when I first heard someone demand to know the “deliverables.” It was at a meeting, and while I didn’t understand exactly what that meant, I knew it wasn’t pizza that you didn’t have to go out for. He seemed to be saying that a proposal must contain some indication of tangible results, which I had assumed was self-evident. At a time when we are increasingly challenged to specify deliverables, whatever they are, it is useful to remind ourselves of the designer’s initial concern with desirables — those aspects of an object that makes us want it. Although “value added” is a concept as commonly and recklessly used as innovation, do we really know how value is added to artifacts?
