Looking at Sharing and Collaboration

As I began to explore ways of depicting this model of the designer’s practice, it became obvious that the act of collaboration must be considered and included.
I began by trying to define collaboration for myself by first seeing where it fits in relation to the rest of a designer’s process.

I started with a hierarchy. Projects are what designers engage in as a part of their Practice. There may be multiple projects within a practice. A designer’s practice may also include relationships with others’ practices. These relationships are called Collaborations.  This hierarchy seemed to work, but failed to acknowledge the scale of collaborative experiences from those that are rich and intimate, to others that are more like remixing or crowd sourcing.

Reminders

It is advantageous then to establish a few guidelines as reminders for developing our model:

1. This model depicts designers, not the whole world of workers and thinkers.

2. This model depicts a designer’s practice rather than the details of their process for a specific project. The word “practice” assumes there are established values and methodologies; modes of thinking and making, that are fundamental and idiosyncratic to the designer. By focusing on practice, we can also avoid the trouble of deciding who and who is not a “designer.” Rather we accentuate the common practices of designerly-minded people.

3. This model should not focus on depicting the practice of a traditional designer in an established industry. For example, the process of a graphic designer working in a typical design studio is an already understood concept; there is no need for us to be concerned with clarifying this.

4. Occam’s razor reminds that the simplest answer is often the most correct. I feel comfortable with staying above some of the complex details and differences in designer’s methods, ways of thinking and collaborating. It is by simplicity that our loop of thinking and making is so powerful.

Sharing and Collaboration

From these thoughts I came to an important distinction that works for me when trying to cover the different ways designers collaborate. It is that all types of information exchange can be lumped into the action of sharing. However, when sharing occurs with an agreement, this is a collaboration, in the noun sense.

Designers share: Ideas, feedback, materials and resources, iterations, published work, remixes, tools and parts, etc. It can be done through a medium or third party. It can be one-sided or massively collaborative, immediate or delayed. Sharing does not only happen between people, computers can also share.

Collaborations, by my current definition, involve only people(designers) through the act of agreed-upon sharing. This agreement can be very formal to informal and unspoken. I’m leaning to the idea that collaboration must include expectations of reciprocation. Sharing happens frequently within a collaboration and an individual may be a part of multiple collaborations simultaneously.

By making the distinction of sharing as the action and collaboration as the relationship, I feel we can include these concepts into the model without an over abundance of complexities. As we come to understand these concepts at the meta level It will then be easier to dive into the details as they fit within what we have outlined.

See this diagram of sharing and collaboration:

Collaboration Diagram Sketches