From the course: Creative Inspirations: Hot Studio, Experience Design

Creative collaboration

Maria Giudice: I am really big on collaboration. It's one of the things that has been part of my core culture, my core values early on in life. I love to work with people and I really believe that collective wisdom is much more powerful than the rock star in the corner. Katrina Alcorn: You have the information architects or the user experience designers who are thinking about the problem at a business level and then thinking about users and tasks and some of it can be quite abstract. And then they are thinking about details around logic and interactions and then you have got visual designers who are thinking much more tactically about what things should look like and you can't really separate the two things out, especially now that the web has become so dynamic. So what something looks like and how it functions is like this. And so that means that the visual designer and the user experience designer often need to be like this in coming up with the solution. When you look at these conference rooms, you will walk by and you will see visual designers and interaction designers, you know, at the whiteboard sketching things together and looking at documents and cutting things out and adding and we are really trying to bring our brains together to think more like one brain, which is exciting. Henrik Olsen: At Hot Studio our goal is to really be very collaborative with our clients. They're out co-conspirators. For example, our work with Dwell for the visual design. What we did there is we had a visual design workshop where we got together with about ten people that are on their Web team, from editors to coders to designers all the way up to the president and the owner and the chief editor from the magazine and we all got together and we did this workshop where we looked at color combinations, photography, we looked at their existing magazine, talked about the future vision for what Dwell is to become. Maria Giudice: I would say we can take a good idea from anybody. It doesn't matter what discipline, it doesn't matter if it's coming from the bar next door, it doesn't matter if it's coming from the client. If somebody has a good idea, let's explore that. So we really foster collaboration here and we don't have cubicles for that purpose. We have rooms throughout the office, so that people can come together. But we also do a number of things inside our project work to foster collaboration. So we really find ways in which we can sketch together, get people off their feet, ideating and that really gets the creative juices flowing.

Contents