Design in Software Development: It's Not About Graphics

Vadim Goncharov leads games, special projects, and gamification platform development at T-Bank. Games drew him in as a child in Podolsk, while a physics and mathematics lyceum and MIEM taught him to unpack complex systems. He first programmed a website for his StarCraft team.

Vadim later opened a design studio with friends, writing code and designing interfaces. A trolleybus route map for Podolsk and commercial projects showed why engineers need taste and visual literacy. Here design aligns technology, constraints, and human experience rather than merely decorating a result.

Books on programming, interfaces, and data visualization connected engineering with design thinking. Alan Cooper, Don Norman, and Edward Tufte lead the discussion from device capabilities to user needs. Mail.ru, calligraphy, and editing courses extended that idea to text, code, and processes.

At the British Higher School of Art and Design, Vadim moved from intensives to a two-year interactive design program. Projects joined code, electronics, theater, and the city: an Arduino machine, an interactive Hamlet, and a Maslenitsa stove in Gorky Park. End-to-end work teaches people to spot edge cases, handle crises, and turn an idea into a working object.