There’s an old joke that a camel is just a horse that’s been designed by committee. The belief is that when committee thinking is applied to design challenges it produces a homogenisation of ideas that ends up with inelegant, inefficient, downright ugly results.
This is because a committee is a group of people each armed with an opinion and not afraid to use it. A committee-based design process allows every person to contribute without the irritating hassle of relevance or expertise to act as a filter. With little or no editorial control, ideas get added, usually one on top of the other, sometimes in direct contradiction to previous ideas, with no ability to make sensible judgments about what should stay, and more importantly, what should go. The result is very often a conglomeration of ideas no one is happy with.
If design by committee produces poor results, then the antidote to design by committee must be design by individual - the lone creative genius. This is the model that sits at the heart of the design industry today and guides much of the formal education of designers.
The shift towards this idea of the lone genius was probably initiated during the Renaissance when paintings were first signed by a single artist, even if the work was produced by a team of craftsmen. It was during this period that the signature of the artist became a symbol of editorial authenticity saying not so much, “I did this” as “I approve this”. In this moment of signing the piece, the master painter becomes the meta-creator of the work; able to apply virtuoso skills (such as painting the faces and hands of the key figures in the painting) and also make a judgment call about the quality of the work carried out by members of the team.
This interest in the single editorial voice picked up steam in the twentieth century. As painting moved from being a craft – sitting happily next to disciplines like textile and furniture design – painting became the expression of the solo artist. No longer were there teams of craftsmen working under the management of the master painter. Instead we have the true lone genius working in abject isolation. Even the subject matter became inward-facing and the physical landscapes of the 19th century were replaced by the landscapes of the psyche of the 20th.
Keeping in step with painting and sculpture, design produced its share of superstar solo brand names during the last century. And along the way, design education followed the same path, producing designers who feel that real creativity is best done alone, and all good design is the product of single-minded flashes of brilliance. For many people, design is about designing for, not with. Collaboration is simply a way to dilute ideas and is, in the end, a form of cheating.
So, can design by committee produce good results? The answer is simply, yes. A small group of 10-20 people can become an effective design team, able to solve complex problems and generate solutions that are suitable for a much larger audience. Asking more people does not always produce better results. Large-scale consultations are an excellent instrument for some design questions, but not all. Small groups, if properly managed and motivated, can do amazing things.
But to be successful, a small group can’t behave like a traditional committee. The group needs to think – and behave – differently. The group needs to act less like a committee, and more like a small community. And to get design by community to work, you need to know something about how successful communities and small groups operate in order to create the right conditions for success.
Based on the experience of leading various design and transformation projects involving mixed disciplinary teams, there are five things I think you need to do to create the right conditions for design by community to work:
1. Find the right question
Not all questions are good design questions for a small group. For example, don’t ask a small group to co-design a piece of technology. The results will very often be substandard. This is because the opinions of the different members of the group have no way to be reconciled through the design without compromise (the camel approach) or top-down leadership (the master artist approach). Look for questions that encourage empathy and designing for “people like me”.
2. Recruit inexperienced experts
Everyone needs to come with an area of knowledge or expertise that they can bring to the table, and they need to be recognised as an expert in a particular aspect of the design problem. But they need to depend on, and at times defer to, the judgments of other experts in the room. Everyone in the group needs to have an area of expertise, a “voice” they speak from, or a position they represent.
3. Give the group something to work with
Materials matter. And ideas are often like a raw material to a group when trying to solve a design problem. Ideas are seen a something to be built on, torn apart, stitched together, shaped, molded, etc. Small groups work best when they are given tools they can use and ideas they can interrogate and critique. Find ways to make the process of creation easy and intuitive, and go through the trouble of creating straw-man ideas and models that can be used as a focal point for group destruction and collaborative rebuilding.
4. Make everyone 100% accountable for the outcome
Joint accountability is an essential ingredient for a group to be successful in solving complex design problems. But joint accountability does not mean giving everyone in the group a percentage fraction of the accountability. Making ten people each 10% accountable for the outcomes will most likely produce mediocrity. Small groups work as effective design teams when everyone in the team feels they are fully “on the hook” for what the group produces. A sense of clear personal ownership of the outcomes of the group is essential for people to bring themselves fully to the work.
5. Create energy through pressure
Pressure is the creator’s drug of choice. Almost every creative person with a deadline will fritter away the time until the pressure finally creates the energy required to take bold steps. Give a group an unreasonable deadline, an unrealistic challenge, or an enemy to fight and you can create energy and passion for the work that simply can’t be manufactured any other way. Boundaries for the work need to be clear and there needs to be someone who guides the group through the process, but a fire needs to be ignited and nurtured through the pressure that the group is placed under.
Three bees
BeesOil is at the heart of nearly every single product and service in our lives. 90% of all transport, 95% or all goods in shops, and 95% of all food produced requires oil either directly as a raw material or indirectly as fuel to run machinery. Nearly every aspect of our current lives depends on oil. And the relative stability of our current economy depends of oil to be plentiful and therefore, cheap. If the cost of oil goes up, the cost of nearly everything else goes up. Oil is at the very heart of the global economy and if the price of oil shoots up because of limited supply then recession is not far behind. This has certainly been the case in the past when we have seen oil prices spike in the 70’s and 80’s creating economic chaos for millions. The difference this time is that instead of a perceived shortage of oil caused by the political chicanery of OPEC, it is a geological reality.
The effects of this are seismic. If the resource that is at the heart of every aspect of our lives cannot be produced at a rate that can keep pace with increasing global demand, then economic chaos is a logical consequence. And the real irony is that our ability to shift to alternative sources of energy production requires oil to make it happen. A lot of oil is needed to make wind turbines. As the cost of a barrel of oil goes up, our ability to afford the expensive transition to other sources of energy becomes more challenging. Perhaps it is best summed up by an article in The Times that starts with the statement, “Oil ruled the 20th century; the shortage of oil will rule the 21st.
But surely this is overstating things. So I did some informal research starting with a hand-selected target group – my friends. I asked what people knew about this subject of Peak Oil and whether they were concerned about it or not. Most people were aware of the story as a fringe issue that sometimes appeared as a small segment on the TV news or in the business section of newspapers or news websites. And nearly all the participants in my sample were quick to state that they were sure that alternative energy sources would be brought into use very quickly to replace our oil-addicted lifestyle replacing it with some other technology or energy source, or something. No one imagined for a second that we would need to change our behaviours beyond what was already imagined to address global warming and climate change. But also, no one had any idea who would be driving this change to a new, oil-free way of life, nor was there any idea what the magic solution might be. Everyone was pretty sure it was going to be OK because, at the very least, the US government wouldn’t allow the situation to descend into economic chaos.
Although I like my friends a lot, this didn’t make me feel very reassured.
I carried on with other research into the issue to see what was being said about it. There are obviously strong opinions coming at this from a multitude of perspectives, but there are two basic camps: the people who think we have more than 20 years left before we hit peak oil production, and those who feel that peak oil is imminent or has already happened. The interesting thing is that there is no real dispute about if the oil is running out, the debate is how soon.
Part 3: A few facts and a few questions
Chrysalis no. 1
Chrysalis no. 2
Chrysalis no. 3
Chrysalis no. 4
Chrysalis no. 5
Chrysalis no. 6
Moth
Moth series (no. 1)
Moth series (no. 2)
The two lovers (no. 1)
The two lovers (no. 2)
The two lovers (no. 3)
Perhaps it’s because drawings don’t try to hide what they are. They often wear the secrets of their creation on the surface of the paper. The fact that it is graphite, charcoal, pen and ink, etc is not disguised; it is celebrated through the drawing. Sometimes the struggle that went on in the creation of the drawing is still evident through erasures and multiple attempts at making the right mark. This struggle is often part of the life of the drawing and provides a tiny glimpse into its making.
Perhaps it’s because drawings are often used as a cipher for ideas. Drawing is not just a way to record what we see, drawing is a way of thinking.
But can the unassuming, immediate, simple drawing really change the world? Have there been drawings that have really made a difference to the way we live our lives, or how we think about ourselves?
Because the form of drawing is so accessible to so many people, there are a lot of drawings out there potentially competing to be amongst the ones that make a difference that makes a difference. But there are, I think, three types of drawings that have the potential to actually get us to think differently and could therefore, ultimately, change the world.
The first category is drawings that describe how things work. These drawings are often first-hand reportage of sights or events that few people would have seen and are, in many ways, like journalism. Probably more significant before the age of photography and digital cameras, but there are some drawings in this category that, in their day, probably opened peoples eyes to things that existed that they had never seen, or even considered before. Early maps and anatomical drawings are key players in this category. These drawings, transformed pieces of paper into windows onto a new universe of understanding. Maps help us understand questions like, how do we get from here to there? Anatomical drawings can help answer what am I and how did I get here?
Leonardo da Vinci - inside the womb
The second category is drawings that describe what might work one day. This is where I place all the sketches of new ideas that then turn into the things that transform our world one way or another. Most ideas that lead to technological advancements, whether big or small, start with a drawing. The first sketch of a new idea for a clothes peg, a shoe, or an office building all start in a similar way, on a similar size of paper. Somewhere, there is a the first concept sketch of the space shuttle.
Thomas Edison - sketch for the light bulb
And the third category is for drawings that describe how things feel. These drawings are often very personal images that don’t depict either current or future reality, but instead capture a feeling or an idea that is otherwise ineffable. These drawings are perhaps less able to change the world given the fact that they tend to be driven by the drawing itself. What I mean here is that in the first two categories, it is clear that the drawing is not the end goal, it is simply a means. The drawing is a way to visualise something that either is, or could be.
Antony Gormley - figure
But in this third category, the drawing is both the means and the end at the same time. These drawings, if they do change the world, aren't operating on the mass marketing level of change of the previous two categories. This third category is more personal and if they change the world, they do so by impacting the lives and psychologies of only a few people, but the impact is potentially very deep.
Head towards the light
