Nordic.design 2018 • Noah Levin - Designing in the Open

Designing in the Open: Shedding the fear of collaboration, and embracing feedback earlier in the design process.

Great ideas can come from anywhere. And getting those ideas into the world takes much more than just craft. A huge part of the job of a designer is frequent communication and collaboration. Yet many companies operate design teams in silos, hoarding great ideas behind the walls of the sacred design studio and exposing them only after they feel polished and ready. When revealed to the broader team, they often discover the ideas to be fraught with engineering challenges, confused stakeholders, and missed goals.
How might we explore sharing ideas earlier in the design process? How do we balance the importance of individual focus for deep work, and the need to gather broad feedback to let the best ideas develop and flourish? How can we adopt healthier collaboration styles during critique?
This talk examines the idea of openness during the design process, and how that process is changing with new technology to allow people to appropriately diverge, converge, and ship great work.

Noah Levin
Noah is the Design Manager at Figma, where he gets to meet with design teams of all shapes and sizes to build better tools for them. Before that he led the design team at ClassPass in NYC, and the iOS Search team at Google in Mountain View. He also spent some time teaching designers to code as an advisor at Framer, and building a digital assistant for Astronauts at NASA. He studied Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon and is a Pittsburgh native who’s convinced it’s the most underrated city in the world.

Thanks to this year's sponsors:

[MrCookBook]

This is an amazing presentation! Literally shifted my thoughts on how to approach collaboration.