Eiffel Over

Tag: DesignLeadership

  • Don’t interrupt

    I need to get that invoice out. What was I thinking about? Should I order another coffee? There’s so much to do before Christmas. Is the role of the regenerative designer to fully imagine a regenerative world or just design the next step? Am I hungry? I must write those slides for Monday.

    Thoughts can be scrambled, non-linear, profound, or anodyne. They might gush out in torrents or emerge as a slow trickle.

    But a conversation provides the chance to focus—a chance to tether those thoughts down, to allow them to build.

    In conversation, we have to speak, and the power of language lies in its ability to provide a framework for expressing and organising our thoughts.

    Random musings must be transformed into nouns, verbs, and adjectives, structured by the rules of grammar.

    The thoughts we choose to express must be organised to keep our listener interested (I’m more likely to stay on topic and not digress into talking about invoicing).

    Giving someone the opportunity to speak is also giving them the opportunity to think—to refine and develop their ideas as they go.

    So, keep them talking – don’t interrupt.

  • Juice the brief

    Juice the Brief is one of my favourite techniques for uncovering the possibilities hidden in a design brief. It’s a simple yet powerful way to stimulate creativity, generate new ideas, and explore questions that might not otherwise surface.

    How to Juice the Brief: Step-by-Step Guide

    To begin, you need a design brief—or at least a written description of the need or potential you’ve identified in a situation. It’s crucial that this is written down so it can be read aloud.

    Next, prepare your workspace by writing the following three headings on a large sheet of paper, a flip chart, or an online whiteboard: Information, Questions, and Ideas.

    Step 1: Write Down the Brief
    Ensure the brief is clearly documented. This is the foundation for the process and will guide your team’s exploration.

    Step 2: Read the Brief Slowly
    One person reads the brief out slowly—and I mean really slowly. The goal is to give everyone listening enough time to focus on their thoughts and notice:

    • Any information (e.g., design requirements, facts about the project).
    • Any questions that come to mind (e.g., about the end-user, the site, or the requirements).
    • Any ideas, no matter how unformed or rough, that the brief inspires.

    Step 3: Extract Information, Questions, and Ideas
    Listeners write down their thoughts under the corresponding headings:

    • Information: Captures specific details from the brief that are important to the project.
    • Questions: Identifies areas needing clarification, exploration, or further research.
    • Ideas: Encourages creative sparks—small or large—that can fuel the design process.

    In this divergent phase, every thought is valuable. Questions often lead to new information or ideas. Ideas inspire further questions, encouraging exploration and deeper understanding.

    Why Juice the Brief

    Juicing the Brief is like spinning the dense words of a brief apart in a centrifuge. It extracts the rich potential hidden within and reveals creative stimuli that might otherwise be overlooked.

    The name? It wasn’t mine. This technique originally had a more formal title, but one of my trainees—whose name, alas, I don’t recall—said, “Do you juice the brief?” Yes, that’s exactly what we’re doing.

    (Juicing the brief is just one of the many creative thinking tools in our conceptual design training for engineers (and other humans) at Constructivist.)

  • 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.