Thought You Should See This

July 5, 2011

"Collaboration is quite possibly *the* pivotal dynamic in generating great design results."

—

In The Case for Competitive Collaboration, Teague creative director Tad Toulis outlines his thesis that competitive collaboration is the means by which robust business of the future will be built. He’s not referring to the “whimsical, feel-good stuff that dissipates at the first sign of trouble” but an “all out, skin in the game style of cooperation that requires real commitment from both parties.” And he has some suggestions for thinking about the design process. Some key quotes:

If you find design problems getting easier—you are most likely repeating yourself.

Love this careful warning that with experience can come laziness or the willingness to fall back on the tried and tested. This doesn’t just apply to designers, and the ability to challenge oneself to do more, better, different every single time is a key skill in today’s marketplace.

Making is an inextricable part of good design exploration. PowerPoint is an abstraction of an abstraction. Things don’t fail quickly in abstract.

A good reminder for why designers are there in the first place. Not to aestheticize existing ideas, but to come up with new ones. That process involves trying, learning and trying again.

Schedules and meetings chew up a lot of ‘finding’ time. The design process needs distraction, a chance to open the windows and let in fresh air. When this isn’t allowed for, ideas become stilted, growing into outsized caricatures of their former selves.

This is key. Protecting the creative process, impenetrable to so many, is critical. Managers should remember that while design may be an imprecise science, it is not unpredictable, and they must have faith that their creative teams will deliver. (If they don’t, well, everyone might as well pack up and go home.)