Design: individual and not democratic

written by Javier on 19/07/2009

Taken from FastCompany’s Design Is a Point of View: Seven Truths in Designing by Breitt Lovelady:

3. EMPOWER individual creativity. We’ve all heard the term “design by committee” or possibly the old maxim that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. And I strongly agree. It’s very difficult to create groupthink around multiple points of view. It’s great to voice them, collect them and prioritize them, but to avoid camels, I recommend empowering one ultimate individual you trust to become the director and keeper of the vision. Empowering individual creativity also ensures a higher level of passion, focus, commitment and ownership for the results.

5. DESIGN is not a democracy. Democracies are fine, mainly for collecting diverse input. But they can kill design. Often too many opinions water down the clarity of the design intent. I’ve had many clients where there are way too many brilliant people involved in programs. They find it their duty to provide all the alternative solutions or insights to every program–always broadening the thinking–instead of focusing on decision-making. If not for the benevolent dictatorship of the program director in these programs, they would never reach the goal. Design requires focused leadership, not democratic consensus.

There is 1 comment to this article:

  1. 20/07/2009Outsider says:

    I don’t think leadership and consensus are mutually exclusive.

    After all, what is product success itself, ultimately, but a form of consensus, a consensus among the users around the fact that the product meets their needs? And, wouldn’t it be great if you could create a “design womb” where your design had to progressively face the challenges it will face later in the market, and prove its viability, as it develops from an initial set of design decisions, through a conceptual design, towards a detailed design? Personally, I’m discovering well-done participatory design is a very useful approach to big and complex design projects, because it helps create this kind of environment. Of course there are other approaches too. As a matter of fact, I love individual, designer-authority-driven design. Among other things, it boosts my self-esteem. But individual design is just not always the right approach, and when this is the case, I sometimes have other policy than rejecting the job, which by the way is a perfectly respectable option.

    What the author calls “design by committee”, in my opinion, is nothing but the disastrous outcome of participatory design poorly done. Well-made participatory design has a time for diverging and a time for converging, a time for gathering legitimate interests and points of view, and a time for making stakeholders renounce to what must be renounced in order to have a solid product, a time for letting everybody speak their mind, and a time for strong, cohesive leadership. And no, a process of well-done participatory design is not democratic as in “majority-driven”. But it can be democratic as in “born from dialogue and shared vision”.

    Phew, this is not easy. A good leader of participatory design processes should prevent contradictory design decisions to be made, and make all stakeholders realize that whenever concepts like “making a compromise”, “staying in the virtuous middle” and “balance between this and that” start to fly in circles above the design, it’s very likely that it has the smell of death :-D

    There are solutions for this. For instance, there should be always a single person (we like to call her “the problem owner”) who is generally recognized as the person with the higher stakes in the outcome, and whose ultimate decisions must be accepted by everybody. By the way, this person rarely is the designer –we designers can only get to star as “problem owners” when we’re making our own products.

    Of course you can make good, coherent products out of simple sets of constraints (be them organizational, technical, business, or user-related). The matter is, can we make good and coherent products out of complex sets of constraints, even when many of these constraints are implicit and won’t surface until the product starts taking shape? (Notice I’m defining “constraints” as “whatever factors will make your product fail if you violate them”. Let’s assume you can’t wish or bully them away). The answer, in my opinion is yes, and participatory design does help here if done correctly.

    If a designer has tried to do participatory design in the past, and the outcome was a mess, maybe it wasn’t because participatory design does not work. Maybe it is because participatory design is not easy, and it requires a series of skills thay are built over time, and a mindset which is different from the one required for individual, designer-authority-driven design (arrogance, for instance, is an extremely effective participatory design killer). The fact I’m not good at something, or the fact I’m not interested in it, does not necessarily mean that that something is a waste of time.

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