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. Itâs too siloed and separate; âcollaborationâ 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 âthe creative team,â 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:
âTwo 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.â
Isnât 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 Iâve 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 âThe Hot Potato Process,â 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 âfashionsâ 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. Itâs 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, youâd 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 wouldnât 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
AÂ QuoteâWe believe that in-person collaboration is essential to our culture and our future,â said Deirdre OâBrien, senior vice president of retail and people, in a video recording viewed by The Verge. âIf 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.â
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. Donât worry about finishing. If youâre a developer, you can start doing things while your design or information architect are working because a lot of your work actually isnât dependent on their work. Some of it is, so you probably wonât be able to finish, but that shouldnât 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. Youâre 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 â 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 wonât collapse if one or two membersâ 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
AÂ Fragment by Matt WebbTo use slightly different terms, mutual appreciation is a healthy jealousy without envy â a drive to achieve the same but without wanting to take it from the other.
- ââThe Small Groupââ
- ââSceniusââ
Winning by Design: The Methods of Gordon Murray
A case study of the working methods of one particularly successful designer in a highly competitive design domain - Formula One racing car design. Gordon Murray was chief designer for the very successful Brabham and McLaren racing car teams in the 1970s and 1980s. His record of success is characterised by innovative breakthroughs, often arising as sudden illuminations, based on considering the task from first principles and from a systemic viewpoint. His working methods are highly personal, and include intensive use of drawings. Personality factors and team management abilities also appear to be relevant. There are some evident similarities with some other successful, innovative designers
You need to make the step forward
Throughout a racing season there is constant, relentless pressure on the designer to keep making design improvements. But there is a limit to what can be achieved with any car design, before a jump has to be made to basically a new design, an innovation. As Gordon Murray says, âGiven the situation and the pressure at any one time, you do get to the brick wall...I mean you're doing all these normal modifications, you know you can't go any quicker, you need to make the step forward.â
In the midst of the pressure, the fervour, the panic, he âused to get breakthroughs, I mean I used to get like suddenly a mental block's lifted.â
Drawing the bits
That's what is great about race car design, because even though you've had the big idea - the âlight bulbâ thing, which is fun - the real fun is actually taking these individual things, that nobody's every done before, and in no time at all try and think of a way of designing them. And not only think of a way of doing them, but drawing the bits, having them made and testing them.
Like designing things for the first time
Gordon Murray insists on keeping experience 'at the back of your mind, not the front' and to work from first principles when designing. For instance, in designing a component such as a suspension wishbone, 'it's all too easy - and the longer you're in design the easier it is - to say, I know all about wishbones, this is how it's going to look because that's what wishbones look like.' But if you want to make a step forward, if you're looking for ways of making it much better and much lighter, than you have to go right back to load path analysis. It is like designing things for the first time, rather than the nth time.
Wonder Plots
Working from first principles, and working in a highly organized way seem to come naturally to him, but his personal design process is much less structured than the results might suggest. Although he can tightly organize his team and run a complex racing organisation, his personal ways of designing are relatively unstructured, based on annotated, thumb-nail sketches. âI don't sit down and say, OK, now I've had the idea, let's see, this is a solution, these are the different ways to go, if I do this, and do that; I do lots of scribbles just to save it, before I forget.â
Gordonâs design process is based on starting with a quick sketch of a whole idea, which is then developed through many different refinements. âI do a quick sketch of the whole idea, and then if there's one bit that looks good, instead of rubbing other bits out, I'd put that bit to one side; I'd do it again and expand on the good bit, and drop out the bad bit, and keep doing it, doing it; and end up with all these sketches, and eventually you end up throwing ninety percent of these away.â He also talks to himself - or rather, writes notes to himself on the sketches; notes such as ârubbishâ, âtoo heavyâ or âmove it this way 30mm.â Eventually he gets to the stage of more formal, orthographic drawings, but still drawing annotated plans, elevations and sections all together, âUntil at the end of the day the guys at Brabham used to call them âWonder Plotsâ, because they used to say âIt's a wonder anybody could see what was on themâ!â
I never have engineers that aren't designers
Although Gordon Murray carried immense personal responsibility for the design work of his racing cars, inevitably it involved a lot of teamwork. Clearly he has been successful in inspiring others to work with him. He likes to involve team members in the design problems, and for that reason prefers to recruit all-rounders to his team; âI never have engineers that aren't designers.â
The problem with CAD
He also likes to work collectively, standing around a drawing board discussing problems and trying ideas.
For this kind of teamwork, and especially for conceptual design work, he finds computer aided design systems too restrictive. For the McLaren F1 super-car, he installed a five-metre long drawing board in the design office, so that the car could be drawn full size. âThe problem with CAD for this sort of stuff is that you can never have a full-size drawing, unless you do a print, and by the time you do a print it's out of date in the concept stage.â He also does not like the one-person emphasis of CAD screens; âYou can only ever talk to one person at once - you stand behind and look over somebody's shoulder, which is not very good for a boss-designer relationship anyway, to have somebody standing behind you is never a good thing. To look over somebody's shoulder at a tiny little screen, it's just wrong, it's totally wrong.â
(On the other hand, he fully acknowledges that tasks like a complex suspension plot to determine the wheel envelope are ideal for CAD.)
Drawing as a means of thinking
Two-dimensional plans or sections can be seen with sketches and more diagrammatic marks all on the same piece of paper in what appears a confusing jumble.â These sound like Gordonâs âwonder plotsâ. The architects also use their drawings as a means of thinking âaloudâ, or âtalking to themselvesâ, as Gordon put it. For example, Lawson reports the architect Richard MacCormac as saying, âI use drawing as a process of criticism and discoveryâ; and the engineer-architect Santiago Calatrava as saying, âTo start with you see the thing in your mind and it doesnât exist on paper and then you start making simple sketches and organizing things and then you start doing layer after layer.... it is very much a dialogue.â
The common elements in these similar descriptions are the use of drawing not only as a means of externalising cognitive images but also of actively âthinking by drawingâ, and of responding, layer after layer and view after view, to the design as it emerges in the drawings. These observations also confirm Schönâs observation of designing as a âreflective conversationâ between the designer and the emerging design. It is the reliance on drawing, and the preference for the immediacy of the interaction and feedback that manual drawing gives, that makes the architects, like Gordon Murray, unenthusiastic about CAD as a conceptual design tool.
A new gestalt
The innovator has a systems mind, one that sees things in terms of how they relate to each other in producing a result, a new gestalt that to some degree changes the world.
Intense activity, then relaxation
The working style is based on periods of intense activity, coupled with other periods of more relaxed, reflective contemplation. This working style may not be a reflection of a particular personality trait, but a necessary aspect of creative work, which requires alternating intense effort with relaxation.
Strategic, not tactical
The working methods of the innovative designer are, for the most part, not systematic; there is little or no evidence of the use of systematic methods of creative thinking, for example. The innovative designer seems to be too involved with the urgent necessity of problem solving to want, or to need, to stand back and consider their working methods. Their design approach is strategic, not tactical.
Drawing for parallel design thinking
An important feature of their strategy is parallel working - keeping design activity going at many levels simultaneously. The best cognitive aid for supporting and maintaining parallel design thinking is drawing. Drawing with the conventional tools of paper and pencil gives the flexibility to shift levels of detail instantaneously; allows partial, different views at different levels of detail to be developed side by side, or above and below and overlapping; keeps records of previous views, ideas and notes that can be accessed relatively quickly and inserted into the current frame of reference; permits and encourages the simultaneous, non-hierarchical participation of co-workers, using a common representation.
The drawing of partial solutions or representations also aids the designerâs thinking processes, and provides some âtalk-backâ. As well as drawing, innovative designers frequently like to undertake practical work related to the design solution, such as building models or mock-ups, or participating in construction.
A small team of committed coworkers
The innovative designer also likes, perhaps needs, to work with a small team of committed co-workers who share the same passions and dedication.
- ââOn Talentââ