Weekly design and development crit

Clark, Colin cclark at ocadu.ca
Thu May 21 00:33:49 UTC 2015


Hi everyone,

We've often had a good experience sitting down as a group and discussing new design and development artifacts together. It's a nice opportunity to talk through our ideas about them, their strengths, and areas we can improve. Given how productive these sessions are, I'd like to start doing them more frequently. What do people think of doing weekly synchronous design and development crit sessions on Thursday afternoons at 2 pm EDT using Vidyo?

For those of you who don't have a background in art or design and are wondering what this whole crit thing is about, I tried to find some good articles that talk about how design crits work and why they're useful. But unfortunately everything I found was really steeped in vague corporate methodological-speak about "driving business value" and "ensuring stakeholder buy-in" and "management by product owners."

So to put it simply, a crit is an opportunity for us to come together as a small group and look at and discuss a creative artifact--a design wireframe, a persona, a newly-implemented UI or software component, etc. The idea is to focus on tangibles, not on abstract plans. What have we designed or built, why is it like this, what are its strengths, and how can we make it better? In many cases, techniques like our UX Walkthroughs or User States and Contexts will help us concretely assess and discuss an artifact from different perspectives. It's based on the idea that creative work gets stronger when it is discussed amongst peers and diverse ideas are considered.

Crits help us to:

* amplify the strengths of a design
* suggest alternative trajectories
* reflect on our work through the lenses of different users
* identify areas of confusion
* focus on tangible artifacts, not just abstract ideas or goals

Given the values of the Fluid community, our crits will inevitably be constructive, creative, flexible, and specific.

What do you all think?

Colin

---
Colin Clark
Lead Software Architect,
Inclusive Design Research Centre, OCAD University
http://inclusivedesign.ca




More information about the fluid-work mailing list