Design Collaboration From Home
How do you maintain a creative and collaborative culture while everyone works remotely?
In the office, we had the ability to easily create and collaborate on projects. Since March, we’ve been spread across Northeast Ohio, working in our respective homes. So we’ve had to come up with new ways of collaborating and communicating that are conducive to remote work.
One of our favorite ways of collaborating from a distance has been creating an exquisite corpse. For anyone unfamiliar, an exquisite corpse is a method of creating that involves a chain of people adding to a design or composition sequentially, each person only being allowed to view what the previous person contributed.
Over the course of a day, we each spent an hour or two with the prompt and a diagram/sketch from the designer before us. We each came up with our own responses and passed them along to the next person. It was almost like a game of telephone, the original design intent becoming more and more distorted as the message gets passed along.
Everyone’s exquisite corpse contributions overlaid into one image. Hey, no one said design always looks pretty!
It was exciting to compile everyone’s designs and see how the prompt was interpreted differently by each person. Collaboration strengthens design because everyone thinks differently, and having a visual representation of everyone’s distinct perspective and style allows us to understand each other better as designers.
After compiling individual diagrams, we organized our thoughts to make a cohesive (and pretty) diagram. The final product uses ideas from each diagram, every individual’s ideas strengthening the design.
Refined diagram of exquisite corpse design. Compiled and designed by Nathan Echstenkamper.
We enjoyed being able to collaborate with each other while can’t in person, but this style of collaboration has its perks even in an office setting. It doesn’t require everyone to be able to meet at the same time - contributing to an exquisite corpse can be done over the span of days and people can partake on their own schedule. For particularly small or busy firms, collaborating on your own schedule can be extremely valuable. Another pro is that there’s a guarantee that everyone’s perspective will be heard (or seen) and that each person will have the time to fully develop and communicate their ideas the way they believe to be most effective. Sometimes it can be difficult to focus on and convey your own ideas in meetings, especially if you’re surrounded by other intelligent and outspoken creatives.