Design of Design - Summary of Chapter 6

Chapter 6: Collaboration in Design
Is Collaboration Good Per Se?

• Brooks mentions how great the idea of different minds collaborating together to create a design, and everyone in society these days thinks it's a great thing, however Brooks argues that collaborating isn't universally true. He argues that most of the great engineering that took place in the 19th and early 20th centuries were created by either one single mind, or two minds working together. Team design is a modern standard for good reasons, of course, however, Brooks writes that in products designed now, there is a loss of conceptual integrity. The challenge is how to collaborate as a team and achieve conceptual integrity at the same time, which in turn is the real benefit of collaboration.

Team Design as the Modern Standard

• Indeed, there has been a big change since the 19th century and the present. However, when considering the great designers of the past, we can only convey the idea that great works have been created by one mind. Occasionally there have been two minds.

Why Has Engineering Design Shifted from Solo to Teams?

• Technological Sophistication
• Brooks talks about the elegance of first iron bridge, and overtime, the properties of iron and the distribution of static and dynamic stresses are now understood confidently.
• At a laboratory in UK, Brooks was astonished to find a mathematiciam working on trying to find the right mixture for shampoo with a supercomputer.
• Today's technology has aided many different fields of workers with a beneficial way of conserving resources and provided great quality products. For instance:
• Modern farmers also spend on hours on a computer matching fertilizer, chemicals, seed variety, etc.
• Cooks adjust food recipes according to the chemical properties of the flour coming in.
• Paper mills have to adjusts for the varying types of pulpwood properties.
• Computer science was easier to keep up with in the 19th century. There weren't many conferences. Today, Computer Science has become such a vast field of several different sub-fields. Designers of today's state-of-the-art artifact need help from masters of various crafts.
• Hurry to Market
• Second major driving force for collaborating in teams is the hurry to get a new design, a new product out to the market. The person who markets a new kind of product is more than likely to receive 40 percent of a long-run market share. Team designing is necessary when it comes to the speed needed to delivery a new product into a competitive world.

Costs of Collaboration

• Partitioning Cost
• Partitioning tasks is a task itself. It could speed up process, however in the end, if there isn't consistency, there could be major problems.
• Learning/Teaching Cost
• n = # of people
• l = learning
• d = designing
• the total work when the job is shared out in n way is no longer
• work = l + d, but work = n*l + d.
• Communication Cost during Design
• Collaborating designers must be able to fit all of the pieces together, which requires communication.
• Change Control
• A mechanism for change control must be put into place, so each designer can only make change to his/her part or make changes to a part that has been negotiated by the designers as a team.
• Cost is high, but definitely necessary.

The Challenge is Conceptual Integrity!

• Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design. Brooks and Blaauw identified key component principles in conceptual integrity:
• Orthogonality
• Propriety
• Generality
• Today's engineering design are still the work of one mind, sometimes two. Brooks gives an example of Menn's bridges, and the computers of Seymour Cray.
• Dissent
• Some people argue that it is right for designers to have a significant role in a product they are making for their own use. However other people argue that team design has always been the norm.

How to Get Conceptual Integrity with Team Design?

• Any product that requires the design effort of many minds must conceptually be made for a single mind to use.

Modern Design as an Interdisciplinary Negotiation?

• Many people today say that the nature of design has changed, design today must be done as an "interdisciplinary negotiation". Brooks doesn't agree with the idea of having a clear implication that among are team members, everyone is satisfied. Negotiation among peers is bound to lead a team to disaster.

A System Architect

• Give power to a single system architect to ensure conceptual integrity of the design. The system architect is basically the person in charge. He/She serves as the agent, approver, and advocate for the users as well as stakeholder.

One User-Interface Designer

• The user interface must be controlled by one mind. If one architect can't master the interface by himself, then neither can the user.
• For example, at Google, one person manages all of the controls over page formatting and home page.
• Talking to several different architects about one idea or design can never be conveyed correctly to the listener. Not all architects agree on what is to be done or how it is to be done, that is why it is important for one person to be in charge.

When Collaboration Helps

• Determining Needs and Desiderata from Stakeholders
• Collaboration is great when it comes to deciding what you want to design. Small group is better than just an individual figuring out what to do. Collaborating also means that each members should get an opportunity to speak and share their thoughts. 
• Establishing Objectives
• Extra minds:
• Ask different questions
• Pick up different things that are not said
• Have independent and perhaps contradictory opinions of how things are said
• Observe different aspects of working
• Stimulate the discussion of the videotapes

Conceptual Exploration -- Radical Alternatives

• Brainstorming
• Time where each member of a design team comes up with multiple schemes. There is no criticism or judgement, cannot encourage wild idea, or combine and improve ideas.
• Competition as an Alternative to Collaboration
• Working together can always stimulate great ideas because designers will try to compete against one another to come up with the best idea.
• Unplanned Design Competitions: Product Fights
• Standard script of five acts:
1. The two teams, who may not already know the details of each other's work, meet, compare products and intended markets, and conclude unanimously that there is no real overlap between their products. Both should proceed full speed.
2. Reality appears, in the form of a market forecast or a skeptical boss.
3. Each team changes the design of its product to encompass all of the other product’s market, not just the overlapping part.
4. Each team begins wooing supporters among customers, marketing groups, and product forecasters.
5. There comes a shootout before some executive with the power to decide.

Design Review

• When reviewing a design, multiple disciplines must review other designers, users, and/or surrogates, implementers, purchasers, etc.
• Each disciplinary specialist must take the time and review the design document alone, perhaps even study the references and other designs. 
• Demand Multidisciplinary Group Review
• Review team should be larger than the design team. Group reviews are beneficial in the sense that multiple people reviewing the design have different viewpoints.
• Use Graphical Representations
• The common model of a product is a graphical model, perhaps a drawing, or a full-scale wooden mock-up.
• It is often expensive, but it is necessary to have graphical representation cause not everyone can visualize the end product from just the drawings.

When Collaboration Doesn't Work -- for Design Itself

• The Fantasy Concept of Design Collaboration
• A design team sees a model of the design object. Team members, then propose changes usually effecting the model directly. Other propose amendments, discussions starts, in which a design takes form.
• Not How Collaborators Design
• Team members look at each part alone and work on proposal for the design of his/her part. Then meet with the collaborators for a design review, in which other give ideas or changes that need to made to the already designed product.
• Where's Design Control?
• Schedule gain from collaboration required synchronization which is hard to achieve most of the time, which in turn delays processes, and sometimes a step is totally missing from the solo design.

Conceptual Design, Especially Must Not Be Collaborative

• One the exploratory stage has passed, it is time for conceptual integrity to rule. A design flows by a chief architect/designer, who supports and manages a design time, not partitioned among one.

Two-Person Teams Are Magical

• Two minds working together can always create something magical, pair programming shows this to be true. Two people can interchange ideas quickly and work together in a time constraint and achieve the goal more efficiently versus having a team of designers. They propose, review, and critique each other's work, and come with synthesis and resolutions together.

So What, for Computer Scientists?

• Academic computer scientists have gone through a lot of effort into the design of tools for computer-assisted collaboration by workers in their own and other disciplines.
• Real design is always more complex than we imagine.
• Real team design always requires a design-change control process.
• No amount of collaboration eliminates the need for the "dreariness of labor and the loneliness of thought".