AIGA Atlanta: DISCUSS DESIGN WITHOUT LOSING YOUR MIND

Collaboration requires us to share our work; to communicate our ideas with one another and to collect other’s thoughts to know whether the designs we’re producing are meeting the objectives of the project.

But often we wrestle with collecting feedback.

We get comments that are less then helpful because they seem irrelevant or unclear. Or we find that we’re getting feedback and reactions at inopportune times rather than points in the process where they would have been useful in informing design decisions.

Our ability to critique speaks directly to the quality of the conversations we have with teammates, whether they be designers, developers, stakeholders, etc. Designers frequently complain about the quality and uselessness of the feedback they are given, but we rarely examine our own processes to identify how to collect useful feedback and make the discussions around our designs more productive.

In This Talk…

We’ll explore critique as both an activity and an aspect of any communication or collaboration. Attendees will walk away with:

• A clearer understanding of critique is and why asking for “feedback” is problematic.
• Methods for gathering useful feedback from clients and teammates.
• Ideas on how to introduce team members to the idea of critique and get everyone using it.
• An understanding of where critique fits within the design processes and how to incorporate it into projects.