The value of multi-disciplinary design teams

Whilst researching innovation processes of IDEO, Doblin and John Seely Brown, they were all characterised by an active interplay between creating consensus and diversity of meaning. Throughout my research the most visible signal of this was their preference for multi-disciplinary team structures.

IDEO’s internal structure consisted of seven areas of speciality revolving around a group of design generalists that contribute to each specialty. IDEO’s Ilya Prokopoff commented, “we’re structured around this thing called the ‘design community’ which is far and away the biggest part of our business, and is where all our really talented designers, engineers and human-factor experts … contribute to different practices.”

Doblin consultant Jeff Tull reflected on the multi-disciplinary team on a recent project. “[T]here were about four people on the core team …. There were a couple of other specialists that come in from information design and specialist analysts …. There were probably another group of people that came in at different times. The backgrounds of those folk were … political science, business management … we had a guy who had a background in engineering and product design. I can remember a research specialist, a social scientist and a photographer. One guy came out of management consulting, super-high levels of Procter & Gamble and another graphic design, brand-design development person on that team. So on the client side there were probably about three or four people on the core team, and on the extended team it was much larger which included an executive review and other people from other parts of the business.”

Tull pointed to the benefits of having non-designers on the team, “it is also really important … to have some people who have some social science skill that are actually less inclined to make those quick judgements and more able to draw out information, really good feedback, understand the behaviours, then try and interpret the behaviours.”

John Seely Brown credits himself with pioneering this approach at Xerox PARC. In fact one of the most red-faced moments experienced during this research was singin the praises of a multi-disciplinary approach, only to be gently reminded that he invented it.

Summarising the benefits, Seely Brown commented, “if you put ethnographers together with sociologists, then put them together with computer scientists and a product designer, you begin to have a much richer cross view of what’s going on.”