On creative collaboration
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How I've used what I've learned about co-creation - or creative collaboration - in multi-discipline design teams.
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On creative collaboration
- 2. I’ve always been a collaborator
- 3. (Yet I’m naturally solitary)
- 4. Now I’m a content strategist
- 5. Are you the only content strategist on your team?
- 6. Pair programming and other types of pairs
- 7. Turns out content strategists are good at collaborating.
- 8. The first time I felt part of a community of ideas, rather than place.
- 9. But is it art?
- 10. “...Robert Hillyer and I began what we called the Great Novel, the GN. At the front we worked on the novel in a cement tank that protected us from the shelling. We wrote alternate chapters...” - John Dos Passos
- 11. A nicer setting can help.
- 12. We mostly make things with other people, yet we prize the idea that good things are made alone, the solitary result of one person’s genius.
- 13. Collaborating creatively has affected everything I do.
- 14. It’s made me do things that terrify me.
- 15. Why I work (other than money).
- 16. This is what we’re spending our lives doing.
- 17. Content UX Tech Design Divided by a common language.
- 19. “Each product team is finding its way to a consistent and forward-looking design language thanks to a surprising process. They’re talking to each other.” http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-how-larry-page-engineered-beautiful-revolution
Editor's Notes
- Slide one: On co-creation This title is a lesson in choosing my words carefully. I ’ m not talking about this in product development terms, meaning businesses who look to their audiences to source ideas. I ’ m talking more about creative collaboration. Hope that doesn ’ t disappoint anyone.
- Slide two: I ’ ve always been a collaborator That ’s me there, in the awesome pinafore, looking adoringly at my older sister, who ran our neighborhood of kids. I learned one thing from that - she who makes up the stories, leads the game. Stories like ‘Let’s pretend we’re on a deserted island being hunted by bears.’
- Slide three: I ’ ve always been naturally solitary I never thought of myself as a joiner. Like a lot of English majors, I preferred to have my nose in a book. Even when I was a journalist, I hated talking on the phone. That was kind of a problem.
- Slide four: Now I ’ m a content strategist The thing about this job is that it can be really solitary. There ’s a lot of granular detail. There have been stretches of my career where the only times I’ve been able to really share ideas or feel connected to my colleagues has been because of presenting at conferences.
- Slide five: How many content strategists get to work in teams? Probably not many, right? Even in agencies that have more than one, they have to farm them out on many projects. So it ’s rare that you get to talk to someone in your own field about your specific work.
- Slide six: Pair programming and other types of pairs Developers, creatives, UX... they all tend to work in small teams and pairs. It creates community, ways of learning - it can create an industry out of what were just individual ideas. And it helps one generation educate the next.
- Slide seven: Turns out content strategists are good collaborators, too. Back in 2009, my team went from one to two when my friend and colleague Randall Snare joined. And I realised that having someone to bounce ideas off of is actually a good thing. It helped me see that my ideas actually made sense in a wider context - i.e. outside my head.
- Slide eight: This was the first time I felt part of a community of ideas We started a creative partnership, collaborating on talks and workshops. One of the first was the first Content Strategy Forum in 2010. That was a real turning point for me in terms of what I thought was possible, entirely due to that sense of community.
- Slide nine: But it is art? I took this at a TedX at London Business School last year. There were all these MBA types milling around, and these two classical architects who created, in the space of a morning, this beautiful thing, together. Watching them work together was fascinating.
- Slide ten: John Dos Passos So you don ’t have to read this in 15 seconds I’ll summarize - the writer John Dos Passos collaborated with fellow medic and writer Robert Hillyer, while at the front, in World War I, in Italy. While being shelled. And working 24 hour shifts.
- Slide eleven: Scotland This is the setting of a writing retreat I went on last October, in Scotland, with two other writers, to work on a dark dystopian TV/game idea - perfect setting for it. I learned a lot of things from that, like how to listen, how to be unafraid to take a leap, how to give criticism.
- Slide twelve: We mostly make things with other people Which brings me to my point. We put so much weight on the value of a single genius, but it ’s not that cut and dried. Even great artists have sounding boards, editors, early collaborators. And digital work benefits from collaboration even more.
- Slide thirteen: Collaborating creatively has affected everything I do. Right now I ’m working on an agile project and I never thought agile content strategy was possible. But the things I’ve learned about collaboration in a creative context - like not being afraid to speak up, but also respecting the other person, and picking your battles - have helped.
- Slide fourteen: It ’ s made me do things that terrify me Things like making me less afraid to look ridiculous, to take risks, even when they have mixed results - even imperfect things can be a step forward. It ’s made me trust my instincts. That’s what agile is about, in part.
- Slide fifteen: Why I work I do this work because I care about it - and even more than that, I care about working with other people. It inspires me to work with people who know something I don ’t know, it motivates me and it’s a hell of a lot of fun.
- Slide sixteen: This is what we ’ re spending our lives doing Most of us are working collaboratively every day. Even remotely. We ’re working in teams of varying disciplines, or working with people in our own discipline, working together toward a common goal. That means we have to be diplomats.
- Slide seventeen: We ’ re divided by a common language One of the things that I ’ve noticed working agile is we’ll use the same words to mean totally different things. Like the developers thought a ‘pattern’ was an encoded, repeating image, where the designer thought of it as a background pattern you’d upload. But we’ve started understanding each other enough to laugh about these things, and resolve them quickly.
- Slide eighteen: I take heart from a recent example: Google. This is from an article on The Verge. Lately their designs - whatever you might think of them - have taken a step forward. Yet what a reporter found when he visited them wasn ’t that there was a dictator at the top. Instead, there was a shared vision.
- Slide nineteen: This is what makes agile work. It takes constant work from each discipline, to really listen, and not make assumptions, and be prepared to be wrong, and take leaps.
- Slide twenty: Thank you!