原创 Collaborative approach: Does it work for you?

I recently wrote a review for a new electronic CAD package named Upverter for a Canadian magazine. This product is a paradigm shift away from classical CAD packages in that it is entirely web-based. There are no upfront costs or annual maintenance charges -- just a simple monthly fee. Several other aspects also differentiated it from the pack. The thing that struck me most about this product was that it allowed for multiple people to work on the same design simultaneously.

My first impression was overwhelmingly negative. "A solution looking for a problem," I thought. Without any partitioning in the design and definition of responsibilities, it would be a study in insanity. And surely I would hate to have someone looking over my shoulder, especially if he or she could "mouse out" at any time and change what I had done. Just maybe I could see this in an educational environment if the two (or more) persons were not in the same room, provided they had a back channel for communications, like an audio link (am I showing my age?) or a chat forum. In fact, I could almost see that approach being stretched into a design review.

 

I was discussing joint editing in general with my son and a couple of his friends, all in their early 30s. They roundly criticized my negative viewpoint. Not only did they think joint editing was a good idea, but they also described two other products that allowed the same thing and which they were using in just that way. One was a rival to PowerPoint called Prezi; the other was Google Docs.

I was also presented with an alternate view from an endorsement on Upverter's website:

The collaborative work environment that Upverter offers has been very useful as we're often not in the same location but need to discuss technical issues with each other. With Upverter, we can not only see what the issue being described is, but help to implement a solution by selecting parts and building layouts remotely.

Still, the thought of joint design seems foreign to me. I should add that one of the issues I have with Upverter is that the whole design is always contained on a single sheet. (In fact, "sheet" is not a concept it recognizes.) Two designers could be working on different aspects of the same design simultaneously. Provided you accept that there is only one sheet, then perhaps the design of the interface of the two aspects could benefit from the interactive design.

How about you? Do you think you could start working on a design, place one symbol followed by a second, wire them together, and then have someone erase that connection and reconnect things differently? I would prefer doing this sitting next to my collaborator, but with more than two people, separate computers would certainly make this more comfortable. Can you see any advantage to this, or will the result be a compromise designed by a committee? Will this result in a faster development process, or will each change followed by some discussion slow everything down to a crawl?

I'm just "brain-stem-storming" here, but would you consider this approach for a senior designer and several junior ones as a means of helping the juniors learn their craft? Would it speed up the process, or would it simply tie the senior engineer up, preventing him or her from performing more productive things? What if the senior engineer were a lecturer, and this exercise were part of a class?

What about if two engineers were more or less of the same standing? How would they interrelate? I am pretty sure that I would become very irritated and simply withdraw. (I am not a confrontational individual.)

I find it hard to believe that this type of environment could be more productive than a single designer in any possible scenario. Nevertheless, it may be that this is the wave of the future, and I am a dinosaur, soon to be extinct if I can't adapt. Have you ever used a collaborative approach to design anything? If so, how successful was it? As always, I welcome any comments and questions.

Aubrey Kagan

Engineering Manager

Emphatec