Being in the same room
I spent the past week on the west coast meeting up with folks that I’m working with on a project, and the value of being in the same room as other people became clearly evident. I’ve always been a proponent of seeing people’s faces and gestures when having a discussion, since I think that there is so much more to understanding a person besides the words that they’re saying. Their posture, facial expression, and even how tired they look give you clues on how to interpret the content that you’re receiving from them.
Often times, I feel like people underestimate this value and are perfectly content using conference calls as a replacement. And really, sometimes it’s completely necessary. If work is distributed across offices in different countries, it wouldn’t make sense to constantly fly around the world in order to keep up with everyone. So in that respect, email and voice conferencing are used for efficiency. There are studies that show that a large percentage of our communication lies in non-verbal cues, making this somewhat troublesome. Whether or not these studies are valid in a real-world context, at the very least there is an increase in empathy with people you have met in person and worked with compared to those who only exist as a disembodied voice. You are able to see them as human beings and make excuses for them if you have disagreements.
While discussion itself can be difficult without being co-located, I find that design work is exponentially difficult in these situations. If you tend to work with physical media (stickies, paper sketches, etc…) an extra step is added in order to scan in or transcribe information. And brainstorming over the phone? Not worth it. At least not with today’s tools.
One way to help with this is to start projects with the intention to cater to everyone who is involved. This might mean trascribing notes directly onto a Wiki or knowledge management system, rather than starting in a notebook. It also means getting an online sharing system agreed upon early on so that photos of whiteboards, scans, and other material show up consistently in the same place. I have heard suggestions of video conferencing, and while this might be an improvement, video quality is usually low and the time it takes to get it working sometimes cuts into time allocated for the working itself.
Either way, I find this to be a challenge. Not only is communication lost, but a general sense of the culture of different locations and work groups is alien until you engage in person. I haven’t found any magical way of working this out, and I know there is a lot of software that tackles this problem. I don’t necessarily think that it’s a problem that can be solved outright, but is more of a band-aid until people are able to co-locate. Are there any tools out there that come close? I’d be curious to know what has worked best for people.
Working for Nokia in San Francisco, with sister offices in Helsinki and London, this is a constant issue for us. We will be running a co-located workshop soon using multiple iChat video conferences. Will be interesting.
The problem you identified of doing design work remotely reminds me of a recent conversation about remote design education. Some people seem to think it works really well (http://tinyurl.com/9byscr). But I tend to agree with you. The nuances of conversation as well as the ability to build off each others ideas quickly and iteratively are lost if you are not in the same room as the other person.