Collaboration

I believe the way most organizations produce digital products is fundamentally broken. The elephant in the room is a dated understanding of the role of both design and engineering, which in turn shapes how organizations hire, manage, and produce digital things. These companies invest billions of dollars building teams, processes, and tools on top of an immature discipline and an outdated waterfall model that ends up being detrimental to productivity, team happiness, and ultimately, the resulting experiences we bring to life.

There is a disconnect between product design and product engineering.

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.

If large groups are not ideal, what is the perfect group size? A fascinating 2019 study explored this question by looking at citation networks. They found that papers with more authors tend to receive more citations — large teams are good at developing a field. However, they found that the smallest teams — between one and three authors — were significantly more likely to publish disruptive results that could change the course of a field. So, in terms of sheer creativity, smaller groups seem to have an advantage.

With three or more people, group think and social dynamics kick in; there is an audience to impress. Thus, the ideal group may actually be of a minimal size: two. When working with just one other person, one must remain fully focused as the pair iteratively move the discussion forward. Two people who support each other's thinking can travel far in their thinking without getting distracted. With just one other person, it is also easier to be at ease and to enjoy the experience — to get into a state of 'flow'.

When designing responsive websites by starting with a small screen and introducing a breakpoint when the page layout requires it, you will resize your browser window all the time to see how the page layout works at different sizes.

This design process is impossible to follow by creating static mockups of page layouts in a design tool and then implementing those mockups for the browser.

...When the entire process is relying on the two subsequent steps of designing a polished static mockup with a design tool and then implementing it, you have introduced a nice waterfall process in your workflow and waterfall processes make learning slow and expensive, while you want quick learning in any software project!

I prefer coding and adjusting continuously within a browser, the medium of delivery.

...There are two ways to design with code:

It can be done by a single person able work with both forms of expression, design and code. Jim Nielsen calls this person a design engineer and Jim has an excellent example of the problems being solved by design with code in his text The Case For Design Engineers, Pt. II.

The alternative is two closely collaborating people, a designer and a coder, continuously working together to identify the relevant details, taking decisions and implementing so that it doesn´t feel like designed first and implemented second.

cursor watching plays with the contrasting extremes of institutional surveillance and human witnessing inherent to browsing the internet to question how we watch and are watched in the process. Mimicking a surveillance feed at first glance, the website reveals itself upon closer attention to be a collection of live windows looking onto various corners of the internet. Presenting our everyday internet activity as a collective performance, this internet environment invites visitors to consider how they show up in the act and how their actions are perceived.

Hyperopia is a device based on the transitive principle that Reading is Writing and that if the whole is comprised of parts then the parts should stay connected to the whole: look at something closely enough and the truth of the universe is manifest in its every detail.

The book hosts a wifi network, which redirects all web traffic to its internally-held contents. Any website a user on the network attempts to reach will redirect to the book's UI, where they can create a new associative thread, or resume with an existing one. If multiple people are connected to the book at the same time, they can share a drift together. Links open inline and persist in a sidebar along with any text that is selected; the sidebar can be printed from the book as a receipt. In addition to displaying the contents of Wikipedia, pages can be augmented with wikitext and attachments that will stick to the page.

What would it look like to support discussion around edits in a very low-formality way, without any need for branching layers or suggestion mode? This prototype was our attempt. The key ideas are:

1. Contributors just edit directly on the doc. No branches or drafts, no suggested changes.
2. After an edit session, you can retroactively supply rationale for particular edits, including grouping related edits together.
3. The primary author of the doc doesn’t need to approve or reject edits. But the rationale and grouping, plus the diff view, makes it easy to see what changed and revert things they don’t agree with.

Although groups are often spatially colocated (for example, a section rewritten) they might also be spread out across the document (for example, a term search-and-replaced, or addition of Oxford commas throughout the doc).

From using this prototype, we’ve found that seeing recent edits and being able to easily revert them feels very useful—it’s a form of undo that’s not limited to the time order that edits happened.

In the demo, an AI bot for a style guide makes changes as another collaborator in the document. It puts changes on a branch, which you can choose to partially or completely merge—just like you would suggestions from a human coauthor.

The changes are highlighted in a diff to help you review. Once you accept edits from a bot, the history timeline also shows which edits came from the bot.

One more thing: since the bots are simply text prompts, you can create your own by adding a bot prompt into your document collection!

Bots can be shared, edited, and versioned just like regular documents—for example, you can view the history of a prompt, or use a branch to try a new variant of a prompt.

Dynamic history is thus:

• Auto-save every character typed into a doc
• Offer flexible views of the history depending on the task
• Allow users to mark important milestones

While remote work is fine for plowing through day-to-day work, it has the potential to put a serious damper on collaboration and innovation long-term.

Short-term productivity goes up, long-term creativity goes down.

For a few weeks in the Spring of 2024, readers took turns tracing the previous person’s drawing to make a flipbook-style animation. The result was 22,454 drawings.

Multiplayer mode and live cursors create the feeling that you’re sat with friends and teammates, so it's natural that designers started experimenting with them to improve product experiences. They've gone from default browser elements to becoming little components in themselves - they can be arrows, shapes, floating avatars, or videos that bring voices onto the canvas – depending on the user needs.

Is it the notetaking system that’s helping you think more clearly? Or is it the act of writing that forces you to clarify your thoughts?

Is it the complex interlinked web of notes that helps you get new ideas? Or is it all the reading you’re doing to fill that notetaking app bucket?

Is all of this notetaking work making you smarter? Or is it just indirectly forcing you into deliberate, goalless practice?

Create a text document, share the link and edit it with friends.

Lying 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.

We believe that in-person collaboration is essential to our culture and our future. 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.

We propose an alternate way to organize software: dynamic documents where users can write down a travel plan and then gradually enrich it with interactive features. Embark is a research prototype which enables this workflow by adding three features to text outlines: mentions of structured data like places and dates, rich views like maps and calendars, and spreadsheet-like formulas to compute things like weather forecasts and routes. Together, these features allow many travel planning tasks to happen directly within the outline document.

The currently popular Figma has a tendency to push development teams into the waterfall direction and for that reason I avoid Figma in web development projects. I prefer to work with the materials at hand, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (TypeScript). It avoids design handoff and allows to adhere to what lays in the materials.

Scientific papers straddle two worlds. They’re thoughtfully crafted prose documents, but they’re also computational documents containing data analyses and visualizations. Today, the prose and computational parts of a paper often live in different environments and tools, which causes friction for teams of scientists.

...We wondered: what if one collaboration environment could host both the text of the paper and the data visualization code, making it seamless to edit them together?

The demo shows a web-based collaboration environment with provenance — information about how computed artifacts were generated from source material. By keeping track of provenance, we know when an output file needs to be rebuilt, and we know how to do it. We can also use provenance to create a map of the project.

Interactive digital technology is forcing another major paradigm shift that humbles as well as frees the traditional graphic designer. The digital delivery of interactive communications design media allows our audiences to “finish” our work. Communications design “pieces” will increasingly be delivered to audiences as potential experiences to be initiated by each receiver and “read” in a unique way based on each receiver’s preferences, interests, values, needs and even moods. Websites, CD-ROMs, interactive TV and advertising, and tailorable software are examples. Designers find they cannot control many variables of how a home page downloads, not only because of the vagaries of differing electronic formats, but even more due to the preferences of our audiences who are increasingly opinionated and educated in the subtleties of form in typography, imagery and sound. Interactive media encourages audience members to create and add content.

This environment requires a much different visual design strategy than that of the traditional perfectionist designer. What are the implications for graphic designers trained in the modernist traditions of clarity, formal refinement and professional control? We can no longer think of our work as the production of as precious perfect artifacts, discrete objects, fixed in their materiality. The designer is no longer the sole author, realizing one’s own singular vision. This forces a reordering of our design intentions. The designer is an initiator, but not a finisher, more like a composer, choreographer or set designer for each audience member’s improvisational dance in a digital communications environment.

While the general concept of a wiki is thus extremely well known, somewhat less well known is the history of wiki development. Wikis were an outgrowth of the development of what is known as "pattern languages" in software, or as they are sometimes referred to, "design patterns." As we describe below, they were in fact developed as tools to facilitate efficient sharing and modifying of patterns. In part for this reason, the structure of wikis itself bears a relationship to the structure of patterns and pattern languages—a relationship that, as we will also discuss, offers intriguing new opportunities. This relationship, and the evolving opportunities it presents, will be a central focus of this paper.

Specifically, we will present a new approach to wiki that includes greater capacity to handle and process quantitative elements. This new approach makes greater use of the logic of pattern languages within the structure of wiki pages. It also exploits the power of "federated" open-source development, as we will explain below.

Remote work seems to be well suited for some kinds of knowledge work, but it’s less clear that it’s well suited for the kind of collaborative creativity that results in breakthrough innovations. A series of new papers suggests breakthrough innovation by distributed teams has traditionally been quite difficult, but also that things have changed, possibly dramatically, as remote collaboration technology has improved.

...There are two key results: complex patents are more likely to be the work of teams. And among patents by a team of inventors, the inventors are more likely to reside in the same city if the patent is more complex. It seems that, at least over 1836-1975, it is hard to do complex work at a distance.

[...But] remote teams have recently begun to produce slightly more disruptive ideas than colocated teams.

"Artists need to be in there from the start, making the argument for quality. The key to this thing is, for example, if you give an engineer a set of criteria which does not include a quality quotient, as it were—that is, if this sense of the quality, the character of the place, is not a part of his original motivation—he will then basically put the road straight down the middle. He has no reason to curve it. But if I can convince him that quality is absolutely a worthwhile thing and we can work out a way in which the road can be efficient and also wander down by the river, then we essentially have both: he provides his sort of expertise in that the road works, I provide quality in that it passes by the river. In that way, art gets built into the criteria from the beginning rather than being added on afterward."

Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.

What is different about construction is the level of coordination that takes place: whereas in a car everything is carefully designed to tightly integrate together, in housing construction the work can be done (and often is) with surprisingly little coordination between the various trades. Even something as seemingly basic as getting subcontractors together at the beginning of the design process to come up with a coordinated design is a very unusual practice in home construction. This style of work organization reduces upfront cost required, and allows homes to be built with an unusually inexpensive design process compared to other products, but it also means that innovation is risky, and new products tend to be evolutionary ones that don’t change the overall construction process.

if you search for “lightweight websites” on the web, you will come across very utilitarian definitions of what lightweight sites are — small or even smaller in file size. this is great — as i am all for a web that is quickly loading, good for the environment, and accessible — but this is a very literal definition.

for this workshop, i want to extend the definition of lightweightness to a more literary or feeling-based one. i think lightweightness is about seeing the world in a new way.

To 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.

Normally after the design was built, you would find places for the art to be located and then you would go out and select the artist that you wanted. That is historically, the traditional way to go.

But this time, someone else was calling the shots. A planning official, basically, who comes along and says, “We want you guys to work with an artist.” And the architects are like, “Sure of course.” But then the official goes—“No, you don’t quite understand. We want you to use an artist as a co-equal member of the design team.” That is, the artists are going to have just as much control as the architects. It was really unheard of.

I think it’s high time organizations start creating their design systems with a more process-led approach. Rather than starting with design patterns, we need to look at the ways our teams currently work, and then identifying how a design system would function within that broader organizational context.

The 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?

Propinquity, the state of being close to someone or something; proximity.

The law of propinquity states that the greater physical (or psychological) proximity between people, the greater the chance that they will form friendships or romantic relationships.

...It seems almost old fashioned to be talking about office design in 2024, but it would negligent to not consider these studies when we talk about team dynamics and communication.

The binary nature of the Remote Working Vs Return To The Office debate often dodges the issue about the vital role of communication when it comes to the spread of ideas and innovation.

...If you are doing solid repeatable work, or work that requires intense solo concentration, you can work from pretty much anywhere.

If you are in a discovery phase of work, and trying to fuse ideas together from multiple viewpoints remote working might be a hindrance.

As an online writer, my philosophy is link maximalism; links add another layer to my writing, whether I’m linking to an expansion of a particular idea or another person’s take, providing evidence or citation, or making a joke by juxtaposing text and target. Links reveal personality as much as the text. Linking allows us to stretch our ideas, embedding complexity, acknowledging ambiguity, holding contradictions.

Online writing is not the same as book or magazine writing, even op-ed or letter-to-the-editor writing. To understand online writing, you also need to understand its ecosystem: online, we think together, iterating on each other and boosting ideas we like by linking to them. Online writing is conversational, social, and deeply embedded in remix culture (all the more suitable for back-linking). It’s interconnected in a way and degree that’s not possible for print formats. Much of the power of online thinking is how ideas synthesize out of the collective.

When we link in our writing, we are doing the same work as algorithms on platforms — deciding what is worth reading — but we aren’t subject to the harmful incentives that turn silos into Dante’s Inferno.

There are a lot of things I’d like to make — maybe you can help! Please let me know if:

• you know of an existing solution to one of the following ideas
• you have suggestions/pointers about a relevant technique/approach
• you want to have a product design chat or pair programming session — I love collaborating with people, so definitely let me know!

Getting 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.

Deleuze and Guattari discovered a way of working that was “like two streams coming together to make a third stream.” Sciamma’s process achieves something similar, I think, through this clever use of dueling lists.

It's not teams that are the problem, it's the rabid insistence on teamwork. Group think. Committee decisions.

Most truly remarkable ideas did not come from teamwork. Most truly brave decisions were not made through teamwork. The team's role should be to act as a supportive environment for a collection of individuals. People with their own unique voice, ideas, thoughts, perspectives. A team should be there to encourage one another to pursue the wild ass ideas, not get in lock step to keep everything cheery and pleasant.

Fight 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.

You have a thing. You would like to improve said thing. So, you ask a bunch of people what they think, giving more weight to those with relevant expertise. It’s a time-tested strategy.

The pitfall here is that if the participants are aware of each other’s contributions, they will almost always automatically switch to consensus-building instead of providing their honest feedback. Worst case scenario: the bandwagon effect gathers steam and drives you toward a crap decision.

The boundary between engineering, design, and product management is blurring. Some of us used to have a mental model in which roles and responsibilities dictated how things work—that designers do one thing and engineers do another, for example. Increasingly, more people are crossing team lines to problem solve together...Now, it’s not about who “owns” what—it’s more of a collective endeavor. And the roles have become more interlocked, and I think that’s fundamentally a good thing.

Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

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. ‘The 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.’ He also does not like the one-person emphasis of CAD screens; ‘You 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.’

(On the other hand, he fully acknowledges that tasks like a complex suspension plot to determine the wheel envelope are ideal for CAD.)