Design by committee: does it work?

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 19^th century were replaced by the landscapes of the psyche of the 20^th.

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.