Weaver Digital

This post is co-authored by Richard Morris and Luke Razzell.

Samuel Bowles gave a great talk on pair design (aka Extreme Design) at the Agile UX and Lean Startup Group meetup in London last Tuesday.

Samuel explained that pair design, like pair programming, involves two people working together on the same design goal. This pairing could consist of either a designer and developer or two designers. Samuel argued that there are significant advantages to pairing up in this way with regards to the overall quality of the resulting design. Key to the process, he said, is the constant dialogue between the pair, articulating thought and rigorously defending each design decision.

The co-authors of this post chatted after the event and found we shared both an enthusiasm for the quality of Samuel’s presentation, but also certain concerns about the implied constraints of pair design. We have had much positive experience of pair design (both designer/designer and designer/developer combinations), so our rejoinder to Samuel’s presentation is more a “yes and” than a “yes but“.

Conscious awareness and understanding of one’s own design ideation processes — one of the key benefits of pair design identified by Samuel — is clearly indispensable for good design. This is particularly the case in interaction design, where a complex web of considerations (business goals, user needs, technology constraints, etc.) must be taken into account in the design process.

Whereas some ideas form quickly as a complete image, others form slowly. Given that the mere presence of another person can be enough to influence cognition significantly it seems to us that solitude can be as important to designers as is collaboration. For example, see the literature on the “audience effect”, such as Manstead & Semin, 1980, who hypothesise that social presence enhances dominant responses, which is to say the most common response or thought is more likely to be expressed. However, in design we are sometimes looking for the uncommon thing.

Perhaps even more importantly, the quick-fire nature of pair design can lead to an idea which is still in the germinal phase being killed before it has a chance to gestate and mature. Trying to prescribe words to a half-formed idea is tricky, and we often only realise the significance of an idea once we have had a chance to let our mind wander around with it and figure out the context that yields its truest expression. For instance, a designer might have a conviction that a UI element belongs in a specific place on the page, but not be able to justify that conviction until the remaining page elements, which had been only subconsciously present in the designer’s mind, reach consciousness and thence the design sketch.

While design is (usually) a quintessentially visually-focused activity, we are nevertheless dependent on language to bring our visual creations to life as “ideas” that may be discussed and evaluated.

Stendhal wrote of “crystallisation” of thought, whereby an idea becomes fixed in the mind and is hard to change. However, some designers talk of how their creative processes, both analytic and synthetic, are more like a liquid. Forcing an idea prematurely into words constrains it within a straightjacket of semantics and letters. The danger is that the truly radical ideas get squeezed out before they have a chance to develop fully as they are put through the coarse filter of language. Remember: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (Wittgenstein).

When two people converse there is, to a greater or lesser extent, a certain amount of work that must be done in “grounding”. This is the process of finding out whether you share a vocabulary with compatible sets of meanings. This would be a central process in pair design as the pair would have to do this work in the course of “getting to know each other”. Once the grounding has been sufficiently carried out, you can then express ideas that draw upon this shared dictionary. However, if you are trying to creatively solve a problem then you are having to express something to another person that doesn’t exist yet.

Here misunderstandings may occur, as your conversant has to guess at what you mean and form their own image of the idea you are expressing. Differences in how two people envision a shared idea can lead to wonderful new ideas as the gap between the two is discovered and explored. However, under a high pressure work environment the danger is that an idea may get shot down without being given a fair trial, because it is not correctly understood.

Pair design is a great approach with many positives, but perhaps it needs to be considered in the context of a broader design process that also embraces solitude? What happens in those fragile moments very early on in ideation? And do you feel the need to articulate an embryonic idea is helpful or harmful?