Notes on the Synthesis of Form is one of the better books I've read in a while. It covers the process of design - from taking it away from pure instincts into a more formalized process that factors in logic and reasoning. While the book is supposedly about architectural design, it holds true for any creative endeavor today. I find it especially relevant in the art of writing software. I wish I had the energy to transcribe the whole first chapter, but here's a nice part (emphasis mine):

At the same time that the problems increase in quantity, complexity, and difficulty, they also change faster than before. New materials are developed all the time, social patterns alter quickly, the culture itself is changing faster than it has ever changed before. In the past, the individual designer would stand to some extent on the shoulders of his predecessors. And although he was expected to make more and more of his own decisions as traditions gradually dissovled, there was always still some body of tradition which made his decision easier. Now the last shreds of tradition are being torn from him. Since cultural pressures change so fast, any slow development of form becomes impossible. Bewildered, the formmaker stands alone. He has to make clearly conceived forms without the possibility of trial and error over time. He has to be encouraged now to think his task through from the beginning, to "create" the form he is concerend with, for what once took many generations of gradual development is now attempted by a single individual. But the burden of a thousand yeras falls heavily on one man's shoulders, and this burden has not materially been lightened. The intuitive resolution of contemporary design problems simply lies beyond a single individual's integrative grasp.

Design on the web suffers from a different problem: it's a rapidly evolving medium which has very little history. However, creating beautiful user interfaces on the web is a problem that goes beyond a single individual. Usability, functionality, user perception... it's impossible to hold all these diverging thoughts in your mind at once.

It's quite possible that the recent obsession with "simple interfaces" and minimalism is a reaction to bad design - the only designs that are good right now are the simplified ones that can be done by one integrative mind. It might be fully possible, with the right design group, to create a complex design that is absolutely beautiful. I have yet to run into this, but it will exist one day.

The next paragraph:

Of course there are no definitive limits to this grasp (especially in view of the rare cases where an exceptional talent breaks all bounds). But if we look at the lack of organization and lack of clarity of all forms around us, tit is plain that their design has often taxed their designer's cognitive capacity well beyond the limit. The idea that the capacity of man's invention is not so surprising, after all. In other areas it has been shown, and we admit readily enough, that there are bounds to man's cognitive and creative capacity. There are limits to the difficulty of a laboratory problem which he can solve; to the number of issues he can consider simultaneously; to the complexity of a decision he can handle wisely. There are no absolute limits in any of these cases (or usually even any scale on which such limits could be specified); yet in practice it is clear that there are limits of some sort. Similarly, the very frequent failure of individual designers to produce well organized forms suggests strongly that there are limits to the individual designer's capacity.

What are the take-away points? Is the absence of well-organized complex designs (on UIs) a result of poor organization of design teams?

It seems that if we accept that design is no different than other types of problem solving, you would need to hire highly logical visual designers with a strong penchant for aesthetics who are highly social - those who can work with another to delegate chunks of problem solving to one another. And these individual chunks would cohesively form a single unit and entity.

What I described isn't that different than a successful programming team. Of course, I think strong cohesive design is much harder to pull off since we often confuse aesthetic, gut decisions with logical, reasoned decisions when it comes to design.