Eiffel Over

Tag: CollaborativeDesign

  • Free body conflict/a vector joke

    A final thought on conflict. This time, how the different modes of conflict (competition, accommodation, avoidance and collaboration) can be thought of as free-body collisions.

    Avoidance – the two bodies miss each other, and also miss the chance to influence each other

    Competition x Acceptance – This is essentially a dominant collision, where one particle’s direction overpowers the other.

    Collaboration: This behaves like a vector addition, where the resultant trajectory reflects the combined contributions of both particles.

    Maybe the best answers are the product of differences. Whether it’s a cross product depends on how angry you are feeling (sorry couldn’t resist the vector gag)

  • Conflict and collaboration

    The fourth mode of conflict is collaboration.

    In this mode we are interested in the other person but also keen to assert our own view. I want you to know what I think but I also want to know what you think. Knowing that we are disagreeing I become interested in the difference rather than getting stuck into the offence-defence plays of convincing each other who is right and wrong.

    Collaboration is the opposite of avoidance, wherein there is no interest and no assertion.

    In design, we are engaging in change. The aim of the designer is to taking existing situations and improving them. Since the situations we inhabit usually involve other people, we are likely to discover our views are in some ways in conflict with another’s.

    To avoid engagement is to avoid change. To compete is to overrule. To collaborate is to discover the shared interest and create a new way forward. All of which I think can be shown with a free-body diagram – tomorrow.

  • Avoidance

    My job today is to convince you that avoidance is a mode of conflict, alongside the others we’ve considered this week: competition and acceptance.

    I could try to convince you. I really could. But, you know what? I don’t want to. You’ve probably got your own views. Maybe they’re strongly held. That’s fine. I’m not particularly interested.

    And while I do have a clear and well-articulated model of avoidance in my head, I don’t feel especially compelled to share it with you.

    So, let’s just avoid the discussion altogether.

  • Acceptance in Design

    This week, I’ve been posting about conflict in design. By conflict, I simply mean two people with different perspectives. What happens next, when they discover their differing views, depends on their level of assertiveness and their interest in the other person.

    Yesterday, we met the competitive person. We all know the type (we may even be one ourselves): assertive in their own views and uninterested in the other person’s perspective.

    Often, the “dance partner” of the competitive person is someone who is acceptant. An acceptant person shows a high degree of interest in the other person but is not assertive about their own view.

    In this pairing, the acceptant person ultimately accepts the view of the competitive person.

    There’s no judgment intended in these descriptions. What’s valuable is noticing which modes we—and others—are adopting, and whether that behavior is helpful in the context of the design process.

    If, after considering the arguments, one person genuinely accepts the other’s view, that’s fine. But if one person is consistently forced into accepting the other’s perspective, that might be less fine.

    In such cases, there might be work to do with the competitive party: encouraging them to show more interest and perhaps less assertion. Equally, there might be work to help the acceptant person become more assertive and, perhaps, less deferential.

    More combinations to follow—stay tuned.

  • Kinetic versus thermodynamic conversations

    Some conversations go quickly. 

    Some conversations go better.

    I wrote on the 21st October about the difference between a kinetic and a thermodynamic product in a chemical reaction. The kinetic product is the fast result; the thermodynamic is the slower, more stable result. 

    As designers we may feel we need to have fast, productive conversations so that we can show our value. 

    But if we go quickly, we risk producing a fast but unstable, kinetic result. An answer crystallise that we can point to and get paid for, but it might not be the best, most stable, situation appropriate result. 

    Better conversations take time. We need to listen. Then we gain trust. Then we can get to the heart of the issue and start to do work that is more appropriate to the unique specificities of the complex situations are clients are working in.

  • When WhatsApp is great for design team communication

    1. For high fives and mutual support
    2. For things that might interest someone in the team
    3. For thoughts of kindness and consideration (but don’t assume they’ve been seen)
    4. For anything that it doesn’t matter that you miss, so you can dip in and out without feeling the need to read the previous 200 unread messages.
    5. For genuinely urgent information (but remember point 4 still stands).

  • Lowest common denominator design team communication

    Imagine a system of design team communication that supplies the right level of information and enables the appropriate level of understanding within a suitable timeframe. A way of communicating with our work colleagues that is effective. A process that doesn’t overwhelm us.

    With the digital and analogue tools at our disposal, such a way of communicating is entirely possible. But it takes time to propose, implement, and improve.

    As Cal Newport argues in World Without Email, what usually happens is we don’t make time for this work, and so we revert to the lowest common denominator – in the case of his book, it’s email. However, I think that the lowest common denominator of communication, email has been surpassed by WhatsApp.

    Now, WhatsApp works so well because of its ubiquity – setting up a shared channel is quick, and communication can start almost immediately. But by my counts for successful design team communication, it falls short because:

    • The quality and quantity of information shared vary wildly.
    • There is no checking of understanding (the blue ticks just confirm receipt).
    • Information can arrive at any time (including in the middle of the night or at the weekend).
    • There is rarely any protocol agreed about how the information should be shared, organised, and responded to.
    • Messages come in a stream along with updates from a dozen other projects – not to mention the four other corners of your life. And as it is vastly easier to send group messages than to read them all, we have a recipe for information overwhelm.

    At the start of a project, the quick answer to the question of how to communicate is to set up a WhatsApp channel.

    However, probably the more effective answer is to spend time thinking about and testing a good process for communicating – in other words, designing your design team’s communication.

    If, as a result of that design process, you discover specific cases when a team WhatsApp is a good answer (see my post tomorrow), that answer should be the result of a design process, rather than the default.

  • Design decisions – who decides?

    Design is full of decisions. Which client? Which supplier? Which materials? What location? Whether to build or not to build? Which idea best suits the brief? Shall I challenge the brief (yes!)?

    The journey through design is a process of decision making. The ability to make well-informed, ethical and insightful decisions is the mark of the professional. And so it is worth spending a bit of time thinking about how we arrive at decisions.

    So let’s start here — with the question of who decides. Here are four answers.

    • I decide – through some process to be unpicked, I am doing the decision-making
    • Someone else decides – we are merely informed of their decision.
    • A decision emerges – through a series of interactions between people, possibly without anyone necessarily knowing how, a preferred decision reveals itself.
    • A decision evolves – this is the living world’s mechanism for decision-making. 

    You can see all of these at play in a design team. 

    • I might make a decision about what material to specify 
    • The client decides they want to reduce the budget –  I am not consulted, merely informed.
    • In a design team meeting, we review various options together, and through the interaction of people and ideas, a particular option wins out as the most popular.
    • And I might not be aware of it, but our decision is informed by and part of a long-term evolution of design which, for example, has seen greater emphasis placed on end-of-life design.

    Understanding who decides is a first step to figuring out the decision-making mechanism, where we have agency and how we can help make better decisions.

  • Losing edge (on the disadvantages of scale)

    In my last few posts I’ve been exploring the relationship between the scale of design team and the connection with the places they are working with. Today I’ll go into the benefits of smaller scale.

    To explore this topic I’ve invented a game as a thought experiment. In this game, teams of different sizes compete in a woodland to build shelters from materials they have foraged. To form their working groups, the participants of each team form into tight clusters. The catch is that only people on the outside of the cluster – the ones on the edge – can do the foraging. 

    Yesterday, I explored the advantages that larger groups have, and in particular the possibility of specialisation that a larger team allows. But this specialisation comes with costs. A big one is the loss of contact with the surrounding ecosystem. 

    In a smaller team, everyone is involved with foraging, designing and building. This interconnectedness means that the processes can inform each other. The process of foraging informs what materials are available for design and construction. Design itself might be a process of trial and error with the available materials. And the experience of construction can inform what materials the foragers need to look for next. 

    The smaller scale also enables the design process to adapt to environmental conditions. If, for example, a particular material is running out in the environment, the foragers can get something different, and adapt the design. Over time, there is even the possibility that the foragers could notice the impact of harvesting materials on the ecosystem. It could be, for example, that harvesting a certain kind of timber encourages regrowth of other species. 

    This constant, direct feedback loop is much easier to achieve in smaller teams—teams with more “edge,” or more points of contact with the environment.

    In larger teams, this kind of information can still be shared, but because specialist designers aren’t directly in contact with the environment, a formal process for transmitting information must be established. This introduces a risk: if designers don’t experience the environment firsthand, they may become desensitised to the information. Seeing and feeling the conditions on the ground creates a deeper understanding than hearing about them secondhand.

    While this is a post about building wooden shelters, it is a metaphor for our actual large-scale design processes, in which designers have virtually no contact with the environment that they are affecting by their design decisions. Without edge – without strong connection with our ecosystems – it is much harder to work in harmony with those systems.