Designing for Radical Collaboration

Brooke F. Gemmell
8 min readDec 10, 2018

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I sometimes like to think that I hit the jackpot in terms of my career path. Last summer I landed a job as a Design Technologist at Greenhouse Studios, a scholarship incubator of sorts which brings in teams of unique collaborators to develop innovative, interdisciplinary research projects. As a DT, I get to be a primary maker on a diverse set of project teams, and in the process I get to work with an even more diverse range of collaborators. One of my favorite things about working at GS is that we strongly believe in something called “radical collaboration”, meaning that we create a space in which our team members drive their own workflows in nearly every sense.

“We are asking what kinds of higher-order complexities arise when teams of humanists, artists, librarians, faculty, students, and staff are given permission to set and follow their own simple rules of collaboration.” — Greenhouse Studios Director, Tom Scheinfeldt speaking on Collaboration and Emergent Knowledge at Greenhouse Studios

What this boils down to is a table full of people who have come together with the sole purpose of creating a great piece of scholarship. These people come from a wide variety of backgrounds, and each team is different from the next. As we move into the Spring of 2019, we will continue to grow our project load as we take on an entirely new cohort of project teams. While this is exciting, it also exacerbates a pain point which may exist in any organization but is certainly more complex in one which employs this type of collaboration: the very unsexy task of organizing materials, streamlining communication, and answering questions.

A kumu.io chart which helps us to internally visualize the complex structure of our GS project teams.

With each team we bring in, we welcome a handful of new members from all over the world to come together for an in-person meeting. Each team has a facilitator, project manager, graduate research assistant, and design technologist provided by Greenhouse Studios; a UConn Library staff member; and several content specialists who may be faculty, scholars, or otherwise from within and outside of our university. We also employ several undergraduate research assistants from many different majors and departments. We often talk about the amazing work that stems from the flat-hierarchy, open-ended type of collaboration, but we seldom advertise the pitfalls of the workflow that goes along with it.

The Problem

How do we communicate? We use email, Slack messaging, Slack video, and others. How do we organize files and tasks? We use Google Drive, OneNote, Evernote, Trello, and more. Who do we go to when we have questions? Well, that one depends on your project team or your university affiliation. Who reports to whom? When is the studio open? Where the HECK did that Google Drive folder go?!

All of these questions and more seem to pop up like weeds on a daily basis, and I actually consider them to be great indicators that we are on a good path as these questions show me that people are actively moving forward and constantly needing access to each other and to their work. As a designer I ask myself, how can I help to improve the experience of our collaborators? How can I make the day-to-day work easier and more efficient?

The most straightforward solution may be a hub of information which exists online for team members to access at any place and any time. Steven Bradley’s Design Hierarchy of Needs provides a helpful framework for starting out on a project like this, as well as a lens for viewing what you already have. Our most important need, as indicated by Bradley, is functionality. We currently don’t have a readily functional way of hosting project-relevant information for all collaborators which exists solely in one place. While our staff can be considered to be pretty reliable in transferring information to new collaborators and answering questions promptly, I believe that a stand-alone site for resources may be more reliable in terms of ready access.

Alan Cooper, author of The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity, discusses goal-oriented design, i.e. designing to solve a problem. This idea is another lens through which I envision this project, as there are a great deal of things that I will need to tie together into this resource and I think that designing based on our needs will be be more important than designing for our specific platform, whether it be Aurora Wordpress or otherwise.

User Stories

*bold-faced text denotes primary user needs

Wes H., a primary user, is a project manager at Greenhouse Studios, where he serves on four, soon to be seven, project teams. His role is integral to each of these teams, as he is the one primarily charged with finding the best workflow for each team. He works to identify the best communication strategy for each team, as well as the best platform for storing and accessing work files. He finds that his project teams typically have to work across multiple platforms, and having one place to access these platforms from would expedite the process of keeping his teams organized. Wes also supervises one graduate research assistant as well as two undergraduate research assistants — having a place to point students to answer general questions about time cards and other administrative questions would be extremely helpful, as he currently has to point students towards several different websites.

In addition to managing projects, Wes also helps out with organizational strategy and grant writing, among other things. Having an extensive career as a researcher and scholar, Wes is highly literate in juggling a high volume of resources and is considerably tech-savvy. He has moderate experience working with Wordpress, including the Aurora instance. Because of this experience, he would easily be able to keep up with a tool built in Aurora Wordpress or something similar.

While Wes works full-time in the studio, which is housed in the Library, he is technically employed through the Department of Digital Media & Design, which makes his time-reporting different from the rest of the GS core staffers — knowing who to contact from affiliated departments would be helpful when he has questions. Aside from his responsibilities at GS, Wes also has seven kids and an orchard at home…so we wouldn’t mind streamlining his workflow in the studio so that we can lighten his mental load. Wes is also our coffee-master, and so he needs to be able to readily access documents such as our Studio Purchase Request sheets to keep tabs on our coffee bar supplies.

Sophia V. is another primary user. She is an undergraduate research assistant at Greenhouse Studios, who just joined us this semester. She is our resident social media guru, who handles all of the GS social channels as well as the communications for the Tube Research project accounts. Because Sophia is often creating visuals for her social media posts, she has had to pull resources from many different project teams, including graphics, videos, and text. Many of these resources are located across a very deep Google Drive, Adobe CC folders, and Slack files. As she is well-versed in iteration, she knows that the best workflow is to bounce designs off of other people, and so she is always sending her drafts to people over a variety of channels to be reviewed. Sophia would definitely benefit from having one hub-type point to access all of these channels from, rather than having to have fifteen tabs and windows open at once.

When Sophia first joined us, onboarding was a little confusing since there are so many different types of collaborators in the studio. She had very typical questions about her timesheet, studio hours, and gaining access to the resources that she would need to do her job. Normally, she answers these questions by asking someone more senior than her in the studio. Since Sophia gathers data for her social media campaigns from GS collaborators, she has had to send surveys to people over multiple channels of communication, and has had to follow up over those channels as well. This work could be made more efficient if there was one place to direct people when action needs to be taken.

In addition to being a student employee of Greenhouse Studios, Sophia is also a full time student in the Digital Media and Design Department, getting ready to graduate in the upcoming spring semester. Because of her heavy workload, Sophia often works remotely and therefore needs to be able to access resources wherever and whenever she is working.

Alessandra T. is a Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University, located in Wales, a collaborator on the Greenhouse Studios’ Husky ReView project team, and a third primary user for an internal information hub. For the team’s first meeting, she flew in from Wales and stayed locally for a few days — information on ways to get around campus and what points of interest are nearby would have been helpful during her down time.

As a new collaborator, there was a lot of information to take on about Greenhouse Studios, and there were a lot of handouts given on the first day. Upon returning home, having that information readily accessible somewhere online would be handy for referring to, as it is better to carry a lighter load when traveling across the pond.

Since Alessandra must work remotely from the project team for the majority of time, it is important that she can clearly and efficiently keep track of video conference calls and digital project assets. It is also vital that there are ways for her to feel that she is still in the loop, even from a different continent and timezone.

User Needs & Actions

Possible Views for High Priority Stories

Wireframes

Below is my my artboard, created in Adobe XD, displaying some low-fidelity wireframes for an internal information hub (working title: Sprout!). As the Greenhouse Studios website currently has the capacity for hosting this internal site I have decided to integrate this hub within the existing website, in a staff-only section accessible through the footer of the website. I believe that this will aid newcomers in finding Sprout!, as the main GS website URL is currently on most of our promotional collateral and social media channels.

View the interactive, high-fidelity wireframes here.
*these wireframes are best viewed on a desktop browser

Low-fidelity wireframes and flow chart:

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Brooke F. Gemmell
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A salty Millennial with sweet spots for clever design, ABBA, and heckin’ good dogs. {All opinions my own}