The Sum of All Choices
At the agency where I was first hired, web projects when I started there were stiffly broken up into silos of expertise. The sales staff booked the projects, the project manager and designer(s) did the discovery process, the designer(s) crafted the design comps, the comps were handed over to a developer for “slicing” and html (very little CSS if any) and programming, and the CTO launched the projects. Seldom if ever did any of these people intermingle or even converse in a project and the only person who communicated with the client (outside of a discovery meeting) was the project manager.
Over the next couple of years Angela and I (we both worked there) worked hard to break down those walls, amend and repair procedures, and create a better project process that more properly involved and integrated the folks working on projects. Details aside, we basically worked toward the ideals referenced in Karri Ojanen’s excellent piece over at the Threeminds blog. With the thesis: “separate the problems and you’ll mess up the solution” the essay is astute. The part I like best is…
“…The danger is that we separate ourselves from our audience. Because when the audience looks at the campaign we’ve built, the process we’ve engineered on a website or in a mobile app, or the social networking components we’ve brought into a digital billboard ad, the audience doesn’t consume the pieces of the design and the functionality separately. They get the total experience: the sum of all the choices we’ve made in strategy, in tactics, in visual design, copy and code.”
Karri is talking about everything involved in a marketing campaign, but the principles still hold when you narrow the scope to a simple web project. Integration of all the expertise and resources results in a stronger result. This is the way we work here at Unit and the way we work with our strategic partners.
My concept of design is that it is a holistic endeavor; important to every aspect of business and strategic aims. Surely this idea works the other way, too. At least that’s the functional assumption behind integration of all resources on a project. Anyway, so I have the same question that Karri did at the end of her essay:
How do you facilitate inter-disciplinary work?
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Comments (2)
I wholeheartedly agree – the decisions we have to make when working as a team on a large project have to be made by people that have both a macro view of the whole project and a micro view of the current problem and potential solution. It’s the merging of these two views that is so difficult to achieve.
In terms of design, the words of Mr Jobs sum up the situation better than anything: “Design is how it works”. How it works is everything. And everyone contributes to how it works. Everyone is a designer with every decision that they make.
I do understand where you’re coming from and I don’t want to sound like a little girl, but doing *everything* on a big project sounds kinda scary. On simple projects, there’s no doubt one person should be able to handle everything. And why wouldn’t you? Both design and project managements are part and parcel to the process. If you for a second get detached from the content, you lose. And while I find markup to occasionally play weird tricks on me, I’m sure I’ll get the hang of that, too, so why hand that over to somebody else?
On the other hand, I’m a fairly strategic mind, and often want to do things for customers (crossmarketing, event management, print ads & posters) that will not directly relate to a web project (but very much so to their brand). In those situations, or when there is heavy PHP/ROR lifting to be done, I’d rather hand that over to somebody who loves code as much as I love visuals.
It really depends on what you could and what you should do here, and on the size of the project. I’m sure you’ve heard of adaptive paths’ talk on managing creative environments, and how teams can mesh but still need to know as much about everything as possible. Being a jack-of-many-trades, I rather like that concept.
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