I’m working on a very interesting project right now, allowing me to partner with a variety of expertises (game design, visual design, content area expert, technical implementation, etc). We’ve come together to develop an integrating scenario for some learning. Interestingly, we started off with a bit of the ‘blind men and the elephant‘, each bringing in our own notions of what we were focusing on first (e.g. me wanting to start with the learning objectives and the expert saying he couldn’t provide objectives ’til he knew what the scenario would be like).
We worked on this finally through some ‘show and tell’, and that helped a lot. However, there is a principle that I wanted us as a team to adopt, and that was creating and sharing, early and often, interim representations of our thinking. What I mean here are ways of capturing thoughts, whether diagrams (me, use diagrams to capture models? :), mockups, tables, what have you.
I’d emphasized this early, but when someone shared one, I publicly lauded it and suggested that we continue to work towards creating those, getting real buy in since this one had helped. We’ve created a wiki site that we’ll store documents, and hopefully creatively create some of the necessary representations. Naturally, I’ve already been drawing diagrams on the boards (and creating them again in OmniGraffle for sharing). Others have created powerpoint diagrams, flash mockups, or captured in documents.
In a variety of forms of design they talk about ‘design rationale‘, capturing the decisions along the way so you don’t have to revisit them, just review them. These interim representations, aggregated, help capture some of that, but also help every stay on the same page. When someone has a way they’re thinking about something, representing and sharing helps everyone understand and accept or constructively critique, to help remove the blinders.
This is one of the heuristics I’ve found useful in design, and recommend it to you. Sharing design tips is another idea I laud, so got any of your own?
Leave a Reply