“The peoples of the Mediterranean began to emerge from barbarism when they learned to cultivate the olive and the vine.” Thucydides, Greek historian

You have to hand it to those Ancient Greeks. By the time the Bronze Age was underway, they had figured out that training grape vines on trellises was much better than letting them grow hither and thither on their own. It made for easier cultivation and harvesting, less diseases and higher yields.

I really enjoy visiting wineries. Not only for the tastings, but to see the science, discipline and care that goes into growing and harvesting the vines. And I think viticulture has some lessons that can be applied to that digital vine often found running rampant in organisations: the wiki.

Wikis are an attractive online asset. They’re one of the pillars of corporate collaboration – a silver bullet sent to unleash everyone’s ideas so that they contribute to the greater corporate good. They’re organic by nature and can take on a vibrant life of their own. But they can also sink silently unused into a corner of the server somewhere.

Clay Shirky in his book Here Comes Everybody enthuses how well wikis can support group conversation and mobilise group action in ways not possible through traditional institutional thinking and other conventions. But like many digital tools in corporate environments, wikis need to be deployed and maintained with all the care that viticulture pays to the grape.

Here are some ideas to bring out the best in a wiki, as well as the people who use it.

Don’t call it a wiki

Call it a project space, a workspace…. anything but an esoteric nerdy name like wiki. Using a potentially cryptic term just gets the relationship off on the wrong foot with your stakeholders. Imagine if winemakers gave us bottles of Vitis vinifera? I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather taste the subtle blackberry notes of a Grenache or a Cabernet Sauvignon, than a domesticated Vitis sylvestris.

There are no McVineyards; plan and tailor yours to your environment

Treat the wiki just like any other website to design, rather than a generic tool. Design in this context is all about the information design rather than visual design. Think of the audiences, the tasks they need to perform, and the journeys they will take through this website. Think of the ‘soil’ as it were: what’s the organisation culture like? How open are people to collaboration? What’s the general tolerance level for putting draft content ‘out there’ for co-creation? Careful thought and planning always pays off.

Vine to wine is a team effort

Wikis provide an excellent way for people to contribute to projects, ideas and other materials and to centralise these online. Projects and teams can move (nearly) at the speed of thought, not the speed of the institutional process and approval structure. But the open and unstructured nature of wikis can leave people confused about what’s up for discussion, what’s work in progress, and what’s a final product.

Make sure you cater for the different roles and responsibilities involved in your project team so that it’s clear to everyone where and how they do their particular job on the wiki.

Separate what’s vine and what’s fruit

With that in mind, think about the different types of content you are producing, and who needs to contribute to which type, and keep them separate. One easy distinction for wikis is separating actual deliverables from work in progress. There are going to be some audiences who are only concerned with the fruit, not the vine. Wikis are still quite esoteric to many people, so make it obvious what’s the ‘product’ up for review and what’s the discussion that lead to the ‘product’.

Design the trellis, not the vine

Devise an easy-to-understand structure of separate spaces for different content types, different functions and different audiences. The trick is to embrace the fact that wikis do grow organically, but create just enough structure to keep it easy to learn and remember. Think of it as designing the trellis that the vine will grow over. The trellis governs the areas the vine can cover; the rest is up to the vine.

This will provide the balance between the freedom that wiki authors and collaborators need, and the constraints to ensure it remains usable and sustainable as a corporate asset.

Depending on the context of your organisation as a whole, or a specific project, you may want to think about orienting the structure by project role, or the particular objects involved, or by topic, as long as it reflects the most common mental model that people have.

Here’s one site map suggestion, which includes space for project background, project management, project assets, and pages to help people use the wiki:

Appoint a gardener

Make sure someone is responsible for keeping the wiki neat and healthy. This may mean some seasonal pruning from time to time, where some pages need to be removed or combined with others, or transplanting and rearranging, where some sub-sections need to be split and relocated.

Plant rose bushes in the vineyard

Viticulturists will tell you that it’s wise to plant rose bushes at the ends of the vineyard rows because they serve as early indicators of fungal diseases, to which both roses and grape vines are susceptible. Or just that they look nice. Or both.

What we can take from this is that we can use some pages within wikis to attract specific attention for specific purposes. There may be some assets you have, such as some sketches or visual designs that you could put up front for people to see, rather than just slabs of text. Judicious use of assets like these could help foster a healthy reputation for the wiki. Or you could use some handy plug-ins such as task management visualisation and dynamic charting to provide informative and aesthetically attractive pages that show the wiki’s ‘pulse’ at a glance.

Provide a map of the vineyard

Be clear to all the people involved in your project what part of the system is for what purpose. People will know what they’re responsible for, so use this as a foil for pointing them to the parts of the system they should pay attention to. If there are those who want to be involved way down in the detail, show them the working collaboration areas. If they’re only interested in providing feedback on a draft design, point them to the project assets area.

Take people on a tour

A request made in a meeting or a scattergun email may not get the right people moving to participate on the wiki the way you want them to. Take the time to line up a chat at their desk, and show them how to access the wiki, what it’s for and how to use it. For all the benefits of intranets and inboxes, it can be hard for online channels to model the sort of behaviour we’d like from people involved. Harness the power of the social proof psychological principle: if people are unable to determine the appropriate behaviour, they tend to look to others to lead them.

Reaping the rewards

Like many wine lovers, I have my idea of Wine Graceland, and for me it’s Hill of Grace at the Henschke winery in South Australia. It covers only eight hectares, and most of the shiraz vines are well over 100 years old. They’re stumpy, dark and gnarled, but the fruit they produce is…well… I’ll leave the hyperbole to others, but you should really try it yourself.

Careful tending and curation of a well-structured wiki should produce a quality yield that will show bright complex spice and colour, as well as great depth and texture that should stand the test of time, and… well, you get the idea.

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A few weeks ago, Matt, DG, Mark and I went to Melbourne to hang out with the UX faithful at UX Australia 2010. The conference was a great success and we all got a lot out of attending. It was pleasing and reassuring to see that so many of the topics and ideas covered in Melbourne are already a big part of our work, or have been tried at some point. But certainly not everything.

So I thought I’d share a few insights we gained into how we can improve the way we work back at the Igloo in Sydney. These are my top takeouts from UX Australia— some big, some small and all (hopefully) useful …

10. Other people hate industry jargon as much as I do (and establishing common language is important)

On a light note, Andrew Green’s talk on emotion and buzzwords made me smile. His suggestion that we make a point of calling ‘bullshit’ on jargon and buzzwords was refreshing. I would note that some of the things he called ‘bullshit’ on are valid uses of the English language. Sure, ‘leverage’ might just mean ‘to make use of’ but that doesn’t make it jargon, it’s just a more succinct way of expressing that concept.

More importantly, it’s crucial to remember that your clients don’t necessarily understand your internal language. Simple concepts like ‘users’ or ‘stakeholders’ often end up laden with context specific meaning within your design practice. Recognise the terms that you have loaded in this way and clearly define them for your client (or don’t use them!).

9. Be wary of premature consensus

At Digital Eskimo we run full day scoping workshops at the start of  our projects with a range of internal stakeholders and users. In these sessions we explore a range of perspectives, to rapidly immerse ourselves in the project context and to generate consensus on project specifics (objectives, challenges, users, stakeholders, touchpoints, user journeys, etc).

It was great to hear Darren Menachemson’s suggestion that we should be wary of premature consensus. Anyone who regularly facilitates sessions like this will always be on the lookout for themes and points of consensus. It is important to take consensus, especially in the workshop context, with a pinch of salt. Sometimes the disparate points of view are actually more valuable— jumping at every chance to document some point of commonality might mean you’re missing opportunities to critically analyse these thornier issues.

8. Critiquing, not criticism

We have internal design reviews and design presentations all the time. It is crucial to remember that what we are evaluating is more than just whether or not we, or the client, likes a design.

At Digital Eskimo, we have a clear design review process which delivers great results but not a strict, predefined framework for properly critiquing work. To achieve consistently positive and appropriate project outcomes, it’s fundamental to have a clear structure in which to evaluate how well a design meets the project objectives.

In recognition of this, we’ll be putting in place a more formal critique framework for both internal reviews and for client reviews.

7. Props can help with shifting perspectives

When designing workshop activities, we include props in our introduction exercises to force some quick creative thinking, to help people relax and to bring some playfulness into the early stages of a session.

Matt Morphett’s talk on ‘Designs That Ship’ was great. Particularly interesting was his use of props in the project context to force team members to consider which aspect of a project they were addressing. This reminded us of the power of externalising concepts to drive modes of thought.

6. Project walls

Every bit of available wall space at Digital Eskimo is dedicated to project work— in fact our studio is clad in Echo Panel (which is basically panels of recycled PET bottles that you can stick things on). It was good to be reminded of the importance of tending to our project walls and ensuring that they are useful and consistently used spaces.

What was really surprising was how few hands went up when Matt asked: “who uses project walls?”.

5. Constant informal user testing is easy and valuable

Jared Spool’s comment that: “the key determinant to the success of usability testing is time spent with users” was great to hear.

It’s not about getting the ideal number of test subjects or preparing the perfect test scripts… it’s about watching people use your systems as often as possible.

Formal or informal, the important thing is to take every testing opportunity you can.

4. Every member of a project team should be able to clearly articulate the project vision

We write some great vision and strategy documents, however it is crucial that the ownership of the vision within those documents is distributed within the project team. Too often only the Creative Director and Experience Architect (EA)  fully holds the project vision.

But it isn’t the EA’s responsibility to be the guardian of the project vision, it is the EA’s responsibility to share that vision and to ensure that the team and the client have a common understanding of it.

One aspect of this is ensuring that strategy, research outputs and scoping documents are presented in a useable and appropriate format for our internal audience (the project team), as they are for the external audience (the client).

3. Lorem pretty much sucks

No one actually said this at the conference but it was great to see that very few people had great swathes of ‘lorem’ in the wireframes they showed in their talks. We’ve been on a crusade to eradicate lorem from our wireframes for some time.

Tell me what a block of content is and what it might have in it rather than dropping a massive stream of gibberish onto the page whose sole purpose is to inaccurately indicate how much content might end up on that page.

2. Adapt your documentation to your audiences’ needs

Joe Sokohl’s talk entitled ‘Nailing it down: Specifying experience so it can be built’ really validated our approach to specifications for our internal team. We keep specifications as lightweight as we can, using annotated wireframes augmented with user stories, flows and storyboards.

Importantly, Joe also reminded us that the more dispersed your project team is, the greater the level of specification you’ll need. So outsourced projects will often need a more detailed approach.

Joe also managed to use motorbike controls as a UX example in part of his presentation, which makes him alright by me.

1. Break workshops up

Our scoping workshops are usually a full day packed with a range of activities, and while invigorating and inspiring they are also very tiring, both for the participants and the facilitator. Typically the creative part of the day is towards the end, after a range of context gathering exercises. This mode shift into creative thinking can be really hard for people.

Darren Menachemson advised that people running stakeholder engagement sessions should be prepared for the peaks and troughs of energy and emotion in those sessions. He talked about multi-day sessions in which groups who had left on the second day of workshops downcast and frazzled would often return on the third day reinvigorated and bursting with ideas.

It occurred to us that breaking our workshops into separate context gathering and ideation sessions might be a great way to overcome this problem of mode switching. It also gives the participants an opportunity to process and reflect on the outcomes of the initial session, which will lead to better creative outputs when the team returns fresh.

+1. We can all be ‘agents of change’

My final bonus takeout; a reminder about Digital Eskimo’s Change Agents project, which DE principal David Gravina presented at the conference. The project focuses on design’s power to harness the creativity of humankind to embrace – and even solve – the messiest problems that the world is facing today.

Issues such as sustainable transport, water shortages, resource scarcity and, of course, climate change – stubbornly refuse to be resolved solely through reductive, analytical methods of thinking.  As designers, we’re well positioned to step up and use our creative problem solving abilities to participate in the design of solutions to these issues.

We must first, however, redefine our role from simply being creators of “things” to ‘agents of change’.  The Change Agents project seeks to facilitate the creation of tools and methods to support designers as they undergo this transformation. It’s an exciting project that we’re putting a lot of energy towards in the coming months so I urge any designers (from all disciplines) interested in the big picture to get involved.

So, that’s that... a few general reminders of things that you and your teams might be doing (or occasionally neglecting) that we consider worth protecting and championing.

Obviously, there was a hell of lot more great stuff in the specifics of the presentations, the chats in the foyer, and the dinners and drinks that made UX Australia such a success, so a massive thanks goes out to the UX Oz team. Looking forward to next year.

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In an AGDA talk last year titled “How can Graphic Design help save the planet?”, I posited that design has the potential to be such a powerful influence on society because it deals with the creation of context and our environment. My argument was that context and our immediate environs influence our behaviour far more than anything else.

To support this idea, I referred to the famous Milgram Experiment (conducted at Yale University in the early 60‘s) which aimed to measure the willingness of people to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. 63% of participants (playing the role of a “teacher”) administered extreme electric shocks to another human being (“learner”) when instructed to do so by the “scientist” in charge. It was recently replicated for a UK reality TV show, with very similar results.

The experiment offers a powerful and disturbing insight into the power of authority on obedience. Further to this, it reinforces the fact that contextual situations which we can to a great extent design, play a huge role in the way we perceive a situation, and subsequently the way we respond to it. Richard Farson provides a great reminder in his book The Power of Design, stating that “No matter how addicted nobody smokes in church”.

I hadn’t found any footage of the experiment until now so was excited to come across this short documentary online.

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The coolest piece of direct mail ever showed up on my desk the other week. A noodle box with a block of Fimo modelling clay was held within with a call to make something that represented our design approach plus a return address label and stamps to post it. How could we resist?!

Drawing from an idea we explored earlier this year in our “Agents of Change” installation at Object Gallery, we decided to re-shape the Fimo into a symbolic representation of Considered Design’s ability to create opportunities and value from messy, ill-defined problems.

As a creative problem solving methodology, design is exploratory yet systematic, and as such it allows us to repeatedly generate new ideas, quickly prototype multiple possibilities, and ultimately create new outcomes that did not exist before. Design (or more accurately Design Thinking) has the potential to amplify humankind’s creativity so that we may embrace (and sometimes solve!) the messy problems that business, government and society face every day.

MAKE IT! is a project of the CIIC’s Creative Innovation initiative.  More entries and an explanation of the project to be had at the Creative Innovation Facebook page.

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Student Life is the latest in our ongoing series of collaborations with the smart people over at UNSW Marketing. Looking more like a festival site than a university portal, we literally floated the whole campus into the air to illustrate that UNSW is both an exciting world unto itself and a campus grounded in Sydney’s coastal community.

We all know life on campus is about more than just getting a degree, but often the online offerings of universities fail to convince marketing savvy gen-yers that they can deliver a well rounded lifestyle experience on top of that piece of paper. The marketing team at UNSW seized the opportunity to set UNSW apart from the crowd and together we co-designed a website that would showcase all aspects of student life.

Insights gained through our previous work at UNSW and co-design activities conducted with UNSW students and staff focussed our attention on providing information about not just the parties and social stuff but also the services and support groups. Our research showed that in the end students still have questions about their unique situation no matter how well written and accessible the information provided, so we baked in question and answer functionality right into the core of the site. The result; more people with the answers they need to make informed decisions about their (student) life.

Related posts:

1. UNSW Student Life
2. UNSW
3. Join the media revolution at UNSW

March greenUps is all about Design, so what better place to have it than Object Gallery, home of the new State.Respond exhibition.

When: Tuesday 2nd March 2010, 6.00 – 8.00pm
Where: Object Gallery, 417 Bourke St, Surry Hills NSW 2010

State. Respond explores the role of sustainability in design and features provocative written statements, images and examples of real and speculative works from 5 NSW based designers, including Digital Eskimo, studio one8one7, Lava, Bird Textile and Schamburg + Alvisse.

The greenUps crowd are in for a treat as Brian Parkes, curator of the exhibition and Object’s Associate Director talks about the thinking behind the exhibition and the exciting new path Object has embarked upon with the exhibition.

RSVP now

(Due to capacity limitations at the gallery an RSVP is essential!)

I look forward to seeing you there.

Related posts:

1. Agents of Change at Object gallery
2. Sparks fly on the dancefloor at July greenUps
3. greenups – Sydney Green Drinks launched

Launching last Friday and running over the next seven weeks, Digital Eskimo will feature in Object Gallery’s exciting new STATE. RESPOND exhibition.

Along with four other NSW-based designers we’ve been invited to respond to a statement addressing the challenges of sustainability in design. These responses have been translated into physical installations that are displayed within the gallery space.

We chose to use this opportunity to introduce our upcoming Change Agents project which is a collaboration with the Creative Industries Innovation Centre (CIIC) at UTS. The project’s ambitious aim is to co-create an open source resource which will aid the design industry as it responds to the rapidly approaching low carbon economy.

We’ve included several participatory design methods in the exhibit to expose elements of our Considered Design methodology, while collecting input from the design community that will help shape the strategic direction of the project.

You can check out STATE. RESPOND from 6 February – 28 March at Object Gallery, which can be found at 417 Bourke St in Surry Hills.

View Indesign Magazine launch party photos or visit our Flickr page for more shots of opening night.

Related posts:

1. Agents of change on Radio National
2. Agents of Change at the State of Design festival
3. Exploring sustainable design at GreenUps