Designing Inside the DriveWorks Engine, With R&D

Every screen I designed for Zammit had to live inside the DriveWorks configurator engine. That single fact shaped how I worked with R&D. I could not design freely and toss it over a wall — the engine had a logic of rules and dependencies that defined what was cheap, what was expensive, and what was impossible. So I learned its grammar and designed in dialogue with the people who built the configurations. When I wanted a per-shelf depth control or a placement interaction in the shelving planner, the real question was always: can the rule model express this without becoming unmaintainable? For an engineering leader, that is the collaboration that protects you — a designer who understands the constraint stops proposing things that quietly explode the rule tree. The factory visit fed the same loop; understanding fabrication meant I could tell which configuration options were real manufacturing choices versus cosmetic ones. Across ~40 configurators in ~10 categories, this kept design and the engine moving together rather than negotiating after the fact. My principle: in a constrained engine, the designer's job is to make the right product easy and the unbuildable product obviously not worth attempting.