Collaborative design - an exercise in creativity

Unlike more precise practice areas, such as software engineering, design is subjective. While UX components are defined and refined through research, testing, and prototyping, the more visual aspects of design projects have room for subjectivity and creativity. This is about more than UI, colours, and typography. It is all of those elements packaged into a creative concept, something bigger, more interesting, and engaging than ‘dressed up’ wireframes.

It is worth noting that everyone works at a different pace and requires different environment to get into the design mentality. It is also worth noting that everyone sees things differently. No two designers are alike, we are all snowflakes: regardless of how detailed the directions might be, two different people will design two different products.

So with all that in mind, we’ve been working on stretching our creativity and looking for ways to ideate more efficiently. To do this we took two hours at the end of the day, sat around a table and performed the following exersize:

1. Select fictional businesses (5 people participating means 5 businesses). Next, have people pull a theme out of a hat to make the concept assignment random.
2. Now, everyone takes 20 minutes to sketch out 10+ different layouts of a landing page for their select website.
3. Once completed each person hands over their sketches to the next person to design a single select layout (best one, not the easiest one) in 20 minutes.
4. When the time runs out that design gets passed along to the next person to be sketched out on paper. This shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes. Here things become much more interesting if no one uses text on the pencil sketches.
5. This ‘new’ sketch gets passed on to the next person to be designed on a computer over the next, you guessed it, 20 minutes.

Now you can look at each concept together from the initial sketch to the last design. The number of sketches in the first round varied from 4 to 11. The first 20 minute design round was stressful, but that competative pressure made it really fun. From then on it was seemingly easy. But when we looked at the second round of designs we noticed that while some series retained the initial concepts they were quite different in design style, others got lost in translation and completely changed themes!

Learnings: The goal was to stretch our minds and observe the subjectivity of creativity at work. What I got from that exersize is an even deeper insight into each individual’s design style and efficiency potential. It is very unlikely that anyone would have to design a landing page in 20 minutes but a well practiced designer can do quite a bit with that time. This fast ideation technique is also very valuable in design workshops with clients.

How can this be useful: if you work with a team you’ve known for a while this is a fun and creative challenge that gets people to refresh their process. If you have a new team this is a great way to get to know them quickly and have a healthy understanding of their skill level and efficiency.