“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” – Steve Jobs, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/magazine/30IPOD.html?pagew...

"I think it sucks!" said Jobs.

His vehemence made Tim pause. "Why?" he asked, a bit stiffly.

"It just does."

"In what sense?" said Tim, getting his feet back under him. "Give me a clue."

"Its shape is not innovative, it's not elegant, it doesn't feel anthropomorphic," said Jobs, ticking off three of his design mantras.

"You have this incredibly innovative machine but it looks very traditional." The last word delivered like a stab. Doug Field and Scott Waters would have felt the wound; they admired Apple's design sense. Dean's intuition not to bring Doug had been right. "There are design firms out there that could come up with things we've never thought of," Jobs continued, "things that would make you shit in your pants."

-- Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos meet "Ginger" (the Segway)

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/3533.html

Visual design is concerned about aesthetics, or at least how visual characteristics influence usability. Interaction design is more concerned about the overall story and workflow of the artifact. These are quite different jobs.

Yes, but I think he's saying that they shouldn't be separate. At least not in the sense that someone wires it up and _then_ makes it pretty. "…prior to Jobs’s return to Apple, design was what happened at the end of the engineering process. Post-Jobs, engineering became a component of the design process. This shift made all the difference in the world." — http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/walter_isaacson_steve_jobs

The daringfireball post is messed up on so many levels. There are actually designers (IxDs) who are solely concerned with artifact function and not aesthetics. Such designers are often former developers (but they could just as well be trained as graphic designers or even architects), and in the worst case design-light organizations, they might just be product managers. Design is something that happens up front and then during the engineering process as new trade offs or realizations arise. Sometimes things get messed up and the dev team is forced to start before the design team (due to resource constraints), and the project just turns out to be very messy then.

When I was working in a big corp design studio, my boss was a former pre-Jobs Apple guy and it didn't sound like things were very different back then either.

Let's root our conversation in reality and not in some hypothetical black and white world.