A Product of Colaboration

The first day of my interface design course, we were given a bunch of sheets of paper with circles, and we were told to fill each circle up however we wanted, but we had to fill up all of them in 10 minutes. This was the first task in university where I was actually told to scribble random hings inside circles. It was awesome yet weird. None of us knew the point of the exercise, until later when the professor explained it. He said "quantity is better than quality." Now that was another first for me, I had heard of quality being better than quantity but not the other way around. It turns out that when it comes to brainstorming, the other way around works better. How often is it that the first idea you have becomes successful? Not too often.

Brilliant ideas dont just sprout out of no where, at least most of the times brilliant ideas are the product of a series of smaller ideas being developed further and further. And usually ideas are the fruit of collaboration. After drawing in those circles, we shared some of our ideas with the class. Interestingly enough some people were very creative in filling them out, including one person drawing Pokemon balls.

Today many companies have started just for the sole purpose of collaboration to solve problems of come up with innovative ideas. We saw one in the lecture by Mark Kuznicki and "The Moment". One other major example is IDEO.


"IDEO (pronounced “eye-dee-oh”) is an award-winning global design firm that takes a human-centered, design-based approach to helping organizations in the public and private sectors innovate and grow." It is a comapny composed of expert designers who collaborate to innovate. They have designed almost anything going from the first computer mouse for Apple to high-tech medical equipment. "We are not experts at any given ares, we are experts on the process on how you design stuff" -David Kelley, founder and chairman of IDEO.

Below is a video which illustrates the work environment at IDEO. I think this is where we are eventually headed towards. In todays world we need to solve problems, and innovation is the key to finding the solution. If we want to solve the global warming crisis, we need breakthrough technology that conserves energy, keeps the air clean and at the same time provide us with the services we need. If we need to solve world poverty, we need a way to balance world's riches.

Gas Prices, unsteady markets, cancer, UV radiation....so many problems and we have the potential to solve them, we just need to create an environment that fosters creativity. Closed, secretive corporations where everything is run by authority or seniority and not ability is not the way to the solution.

As humans we always have worked together to face our problems, we need to do so again. Society has become such a rigid and controlled structure that when someone thinks out of the box, they are considered weird. The fear of being an outcast is so powerful that it prevents creativity. We need creativity and only an open, accepting, encouraging and collaborative environment can enforce that.