The Reuse Mindset
The sustainable design strategy to build BIGGER and BETTER.
I live in Paris for more than 30 years and after countless walks and city sightseeing I am still in love with its unique beauty . The Eiffel tour shape, countless churches, sculptures, fountains, streets, royal places… but what makes the place so unique is its stunning architecture consistency. You can walk hours feeling the same architect mindset, but once you get closer to facades, you discover that most of the buildings got signed by different architects, at a different period of time. Along the time, the city builders accepted to embrace the same Haussmann mindset, even way after he passed away. They found interesting ways to develop their own expression style while respecting the same framework rules. By applying that discipline to their creative work, they participate in building something much bigger than what they could have build by themselves. Paris architecture is a perfect illustration of the whole bigger than the sum of its parts and how disciplined designers can build remarkable experiences, working all together in the one same direction.
Reinvent the Wheels
Same as the architects, digital designers are instinctively driven by novelty and innovative. This is certainly a natural tendency for creative people. But while bringing their personal touch and perspective into designs, they tend to reinvent wheels and recreate elements already explored by many. For independent artistic designers, this might not be such an issue if novelty is the most expected outcome. But within a global company employing tens or hundreds of designers, it results in two major problems:
- a significant waist of time exploring new ways to solve an already solved problem
- inconsistency across products and a scattered end to end experience for the end customer
Reuse to protect consistency
To help reducing those bias, I found that designers can develop a habits applying a “Reuse mindset”. It is a paradigm shift, moving from the natural tendency to recreate solutions, to another type of activity which consists in finding the right existing bricks to be reused, and reassemble those bricks in the right way to solve a new problem. Applying a true obsession for finding the right relevant bricks and not rebuilding it, opens a new space for creative activities. Finding the bricks is not limited to a search activity, it is about developing a true understanding of all available elements, their reason to exist, their fundamental purpose, what they are solving in their context and find creative ways to reassemble it in building something different. Something new but that seems so logical and consistant when overseeing the end to end experience.
Reuse to build a shared design mindset
Behind the notable value of bringing consistency across products, applying a reuse mindset also helps developing collaboration practices across design teams. It creates a virtuous sense of dependencies between designers. Looking for existing elements implies reaching out to design peers, identify the genuine designer that conceived the brick and communicate to understand the whys and the hows before you can decide on what to do with it. It is about asking for peers support, but also recognising their work, trusting each other and at the end of the day, sharing values and mindset with people you may have not spent time with.
Reuse to save time for details
As you get better in evolving under the reuse mindset, you also realise how much it helps saving time. Started from a blank page necessarily means asking yourself fundamental questions on the end user point of view, but it also on implies technical considerations, development cost, branding vision… Reusing bricks is providing straight answers to those questions. The simple fact it is live means someone else in your company went through that process and ended up with his best answer. This significant amount of time you’re saving can then be used to address a more detailed perspective: fine tuning, localising, improving… so you’re not redundant but inclusive.
Reuse to scale improvements
Finally, the beauty of the model is that the improvements you made to the bricks will be very welcomed by its initial builder. Recreating an existing element obviously means dissatisfaction for the work that have been done. But truly embracing a genuine mindset and trying to make it even better is a constructive and collaborative way of working. It is highly probable that your brick improvements will be recognised as such by its genuine builder, and he will naturally see that enhanced version as a the new foundational element. Improving one brick, is making multiple product to benefit from it at the same time.
As always when influencing people’s mindset, we face push backs and concerns: “loosing our identity as a designer, leveraging elements we don’t like, missing opportunity to make a change… “ But it doesn’t require more than one or two “reuse” experiences to understand the power of the method. Very far from putting a break on creativity, it stimulates a shared design mindset on a company scale, connects people, open unexpected discussions and collaborations, it saves time for diving into details, offers consistent product experience and facilitates scalability of individual contributions. The reuse mindset is about joining forces in one and same direction and speaking with the same voice to the outside.
