It’s been quite a while since I’ve had some time to spend removed from the day-to-day design issues of my current job, so the past two weeks spent out of the office were a welcomed break from routine. They also helped to get my mind wandering back into some of the places it spent during graduate school.

The more interesting part of my trip fell on the second week, where I was free from work obligations, and had the opportunity to visit Walt Disney World in Florida. While most people I know have visited Disney-themed amusement parks as children, this was my first time. Not having come to Disney as a child, I felt like I was able to look at things with fresh eyes, and since I was visiting nearly a full year after completing design school, I naturally looked at everything through the lens design—thinking, making, or otherwise. Being immersed from the minute I got off the plane, I found the entire Disney experience from start to finish to be deeply fascinating from the idea as a whole to the excruciating attention to detail throughout.

The first thing I was struck with was the immense amount of area that the parks covered. I never realized that Disney was made up not only of multiple amusement parks, but scores of resorts, a “downtown” area, and a boardwalk. On the first day, while we boarded the monorail into the Magic Kingdom I was wowed by the fact that they had a self-contained transportation system via bus, rail, and boat. I wondered about how they planned the parks, the transportation system, and all the integration points to work for most everyone. It seems like an immense feat, especially when you’re pushing that amount of people through the park each and every day. Not to mention to variety and types people—young, old, native, foreign, disabled, etc… Talk about a wicked problem.

While I don’t know much about the history of Disney or the Disney Park beyond the name being the last name of the creator, my initial reaction to seeing and experiencing the Disney parks is that something of this magnitude and over-the-top-ness could never have emerged from a group of folks looking to increase revenue, growth, or design products purely based on what people say they want or need. The idea of multiple amusement parks and resorts that make up a kid-friendly near-fantasy world is not something that emerges out of a spreadsheet or a an afternoon meeting. In fact, I find it hard to imagine these types of grandiose ideas being entertained for more than a few seconds in most corporations. It would be deemed too risky, overambitious, expensive, and likely not providing a clear way of measuring the return on investment up-front.

So how do ideas like this flourish? How does something like Disney World develop from the insides of Walt Disney’s brain into its current manifestation? And how is it able to sustain its vision long after the person who created it is gone? It would be fun to dig into some of these questions and learn more about the process that people went through to get Disney World created in the first places, and what their process is for creating additional attractions within the parks. It seems to me that Disney is one of those places that’s teeming with insights and lessons about design, since they have a need to create and maintain products at all levels of design, be it communication, industrial, interaction, service, organization, or otherwise.

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.