collaboration
It passes by the river
Business people and developers
Engineering, design, and product management
The problem with CAD
We want you to work with an artist
The power of One
picnic.lectoro.me
Designer + Developer Workflow
An Article by Dan MallThe way designers and developers work together today is broken. It’s too siloed and separate; “collaboration” is a fantasy that few enjoy.
The state of advertising in the 1940s was similar. All of that changed when copywriter Bill Bernbach met art director Paul Rand. Their collaborative working style led to the birth of the idea of “the creative team,” the mutual respect and partnership between art director and copywriter that tended to yield unique results. Bob Gage, an art director that worked for DDB, the agency Bernbach co-founded, described it like this:
“Two people who respect each other sit in the same room for a length of time and arrive at a state of free association, where the mention of one idea will lead to another idea, then to another. The art director might suggest a headline, the writer a visual. The entire ad is conceived as a whole, in a kind of ping pong between disciplines.”
Isn’t that what we all strive for in our jobs? True collaboration with equals and partners? Ideas that build off one another? Why does this seem so far away for some of us?
The Hot Potato Process
An Article by Dan MallThe big misconception I’ve seen designers and developers often fall victim to is believing that handoff goes one way. Designers hand off comps to developers and think their work is done. That puts a lot of pressure on the designer to get everything perfect in one pass.
Instead, great collaboration follows what Brad Frost and I call “The Hot Potato Process,” where ideas are passed quickly back and forth from designer to developer and back to designer then back to developer for the entirety of a product creation cycle.
Nobody gives a hoot about groupthink
An Article by Baldur BjarnasonTwo relatively common ‘fashions’ today are real-time collaboration and shared data repositories of one kind or another.
Both increase productivity in the naive sense. We work more; everybody is more active; the group feels more cohesive.
The downside is that they also both tend to reduce the quality of the work and increase busywork.
Pair Design: Better Together
Pair design is the counterintuitive practice of getting more and better UX design done by putting two designers together as thought partners to solve design problems. It’s counterintuitive because you might expect that you could split them up to work in parallel to get double the design done, but for many situations, you’d be wrong. This document will help explain what pair design is, how it works, and tour through the practicalities of implementing it in your practice.
Asynchronous Design Critique: Getting Feedback
An Article by Erin CasaliGetting feedback can be thought of as a form of design research. In the same way that we wouldn’t do any research without the right questions to get the insights that we need, the best way to ask for feedback is also to craft sharp questions.
When we were all together in-person
A Quote“We believe that in-person collaboration is essential to our culture and our future,” said Deirdre O’Brien, senior vice president of retail and people, in a video recording viewed by The Verge. “If we take a moment to reflect on our unbelievable product launches this past year, the products and the launch execution were built upon the base of years of work that we did when we were all together in-person.”
Building Momentum
An Article by Dan MallFight the Waterfall
Start all of the pieces of work a little bit earlier. The key to starting work early is not succumbing to the pressure of having to finish the work. Don’t worry about finishing. If you’re a developer, you can start doing things while your design or information architect are working because a lot of your work actually isn’t dependent on their work. Some of it is, so you probably won’t be able to finish, but that shouldn’t stop you from starting.
Share Work-in-Progress Early and Often
When you share work-in-progress, share it with the caveat that no feedback is needed at this point. You’re simply sharing it to let people know where you are. For example, if you have to make 12 wireframes, share it when you finish 2 or 3. Rather than spending a whole week to drop 12 wireframes, share 2 – 3 wireframes every 2 days. The more often you do this, you start to build rhythm, and rhythm builds momentum.
The Small Group
An Article by James MulhollandLying somewhere between a club and a loosely defined set of friends, the SMALL GROUP is a repeated theme in the lives of the successful. Benjamin Franklin had the Junto Club, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis had The Inklings, Jobs and Wozniak had Homebrew.
Around a dozen members is the sweet spot of social motivation: small enough to know everyone, yet large enough that the group won’t collapse if one or two members’ enthusiasm wanes; small enough that you are not daunted by competing with the whole world, yet large enough that you still need to be on your toes to keep up.
Scenius
Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.
Mutual appreciation
A Fragment by Matt WebbTo use slightly different terms, mutual appreciation is a healthy jealousy without envy – a drive to achieve the same but without wanting to take it from the other.
The Poetics of Space
Poetic drugs
In the final chapters Bachelard lets slip (a confession really) how if he "were a psychiatrist," he would recommend a poem by Baudelaire to treat "anguish." His squabble then is not with the purpose but rather the approach of a still-young profession. And of course, why not treat the power of great poems as something akin to "virtual 'drugs'"?
The world itself dreams
For Plato and many medieval philosophers, imagination was construed primarily as a mimetic act of mirroring, representing, copying. This approach was often associated with deceit and illusion, with confounding original realities with secondary substitutes. By contrast, for Kant and the romantics—including German idealists and existentialists like Sartre—imagination was hailed as a productive force in its own right, the source of all true meaning and value.
Bachelard resisted both extremes. For him, imagination was at once receptive and creative—an acoustic of listening and an art of participation. The two functions, passive and active, were inseparable. The world itself dreams, he said, and we help give it voice.
The past of his image upon me
The poet does not confer the past of his image upon me, and yet his image immediately takes root in me. The communicability of an unusual image is a fact of great ontological significance.
In the world of sunlight
And here we come back to that forgotten, outcast word, the soul.
Indeed, the soul possesses an inner light, the light that an inner vision knows and expresses in the world of brilliant colors, in the world of sunlight.
Refuges
Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams.
Deprived of all thickness
Here space is everything, for time ceases to quicken memory. Memory—what a strange thing it is!—does not record concrete duration, in the Bergsonian sense of the word. We are unable to relive duration that has been destroyed. We can only think of it, in the line of an abstract time that is deprived of all thickness. The finest specimens of fossilized duration concretized as a result of long sojourn, are to be found in and through space.
Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are.
The odor of raisins
What would be the use, for instance, in giving the plan of the room that was really my room, in describing the little room at the end of the garret, in saying that from the window, across the indentations of the roofs, one could see the hill. I alone, in my memories of another century, can open the deep cupboard that still retains for me alone that unique odor, the odor of raisins drying on a wicker tray. The odor of raisins! It is an odor that is beyond description, one that it takes a lot of imagination to smell. But I've already said too much. If I said more, the reader, back in his own room, would not open that unique wardrobe, with its unique smell, which is the signature of intimacy.
Oneiric topography
If I were the architect of an oneiric house, I should hesitate between a three-story house and one with four. A three-story house, which is the simplest as regards essential height, has a cellar, a ground floor, and an attic; while a four-story house puts a floor between the ground floor and the attic. One floor more, and our dreams become blurred. In the oneiric house, topoanalysis only knows how to count to three or four.
Winter is by far the oldest of the seasons
...and we feel warm because it is cold out-of-doors.
I am the space where I am
Je suis l'espace où je suis.
This is a great line. But nowhere can it be better appreciated than in a corner.
My house is diaphanous
My house is diaphanous, but it is not made of glass. It is more of the nature of vapor. Its walls contract and expand as I desire.