Discussing Design

Chapter 1. Understanding Critique

Conversations Matter

Whether you’re a developer, project manager, designer, business analyst, and so on, it’s more than likely that you’ve been in a meeting in which the topic of “design” has come up explicitly or otherwise. No matter what you’re designing—a tool, a service, a product, a brochure, a logo, whatever it might be—you’re going to be involved in conversations about how it works, what it can do, what it contains, how it looks, and more.

Collaboration and coordination are critical elements in the success of projects in most (if not all) modern organizations. There isn’t a single individual who is responsible for coming up with an idea, designing it, building it, selling it, and supporting it. Instead, these responsibilities and the expertise that come with them are divided among a variety of contributors who each bring knowledge to the team. So, we need to work together, combining our skills and know-how. And to work together, we need to talk with one another. We need to discuss what it is we’re designing, why we’re creating it, and how it will all come together.

But as many of us have experienced, conversations about design can turn painful. At a minimum, when these discussions go wrong, they delay progress. They seem to go nowhere. People disagree, argue, and team members walk away not sure what to do next.

Although individual instances like this might not seem like a huge deal, it’s the culmination of discussions that go this way that really ...