Adaptive Path Blog

One of the most satisfying things about being at AP is having the opportunity to work with lots of smart people on a wide variety of challenging projects. But as the company has grown, we’ve hit some inevitable limits: any one of our designers or strategists might work on, at most, half a dozen projects in a year, and each of those project teams is likely to comprise only three or four people. As a result, some of us go a long time as colleagues without ever actually working together.

We’re fighting this through a practice we call open design sessions. We have a couple of standing meeting times during the week that are reserved for project teams to open up their process to the rest of the company. Anyone can attend and participate, and by having the sessions at regular times we allow people to easily plan this participation into the rest of their work schedule.

These sessions can go many different ways. Sometimes teams gather up the toughest design problems they’ve got and ask for help cracking them. Other sessions simply draw the group into whatever problem the team is facing at the moment. Sometimes we’re trying to poke holes in research analysis, other times we’re using multiple whiteboards to explore design possibilities.

We often do collaborative work sessions with our clients in the course of our regular project work. When we’ve combined these with open design sessions — bringing together the project team, the client, and the rest of Adaptive Path to collaborate on solving a problem — we’ve seen enormous benefits to everyone involved.

For project teams, open design sessions give them the opportunity to solicit a fresh perspective on their challenges, and maybe break some of the assumptions they have about their constraints. For others, the insights from these sessions can be carried back to their own projects, suggesting either new design approaches or new methods for reaching solutions. For everyone at AP, they enable us to learn from each other, as well as allowing us to talk from first-hand experience about the work we’re doing, rather than relating second-hand information overheard around the office. And for our clients, it’s a chance to benefit from the talents of our whole company, not just the few we’re able to dedicate to a project team.

Are you opening up your design process? Share your experiences in the comments.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Adaptive Path, Collaboration, Creativity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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