The illustration was made by Tommy Toll, strategic visualizer.

The way organizations work is changing. We can observe a shift in industrial design from creating physical products towards developing services. The way companies and individuals organize themselves to reach their goals is evolving equally.

In order to provide new service oriented value propositions companies need to collaborate intensively with external partners on a per project basis. Effectively companies change more into network organizations. Consider, for example the NS business card: It not only allows you to travel by train but also use OV-fiets, greenwheels, Taxi’s and hotels.

In the film and game industries this transformation has already happened, and it is completely normal to have over 20 companies specialized in things like camera, animation and production work together to deliver one movie or game (the service).

As businesses are transforming to service oriented network organizations they are also getting more and more specialized. With todays web it is easy enough to find partners because even tiny and highly specialized companies can have global reach.

Of course industrial designers are long familiar with outsourcing parts of our manufacturing and even product development but with services our partners are now ‘peers’ and these peers are interdependent upon what the others know and deliver. They really need to collaborate.

In the past technologies such as phone, email and FTP have helped us solve issues with little interdependence. We could email the specifications and upload the drawings. In fact: these tools have enabled global manufacturing as we know it.

It is the next generation of collaboration tools that is enabling us to work with remote partners with strong interdependence. This kind of collaboration is not about manufacturing in China, but rather about intimate collaboration with companies both nearby and around the world. It also affects people within an organization. It increases worker flexibility and introduces the possibility to work from home.

So what tools enable us to collaborate on projects with strong independence?

I believe they essentially (should) create shared understanding. After all: What is a message worth if the receiver does not understand?

In the literature research of my graduation thesis ‘A Tool To Facilitate Creating Shared Understanding In Virtual Design Teams’ I have found three main requirements for creating shared understanding: Sharing information, awareness of who knows what and powerful (multi-channel) communication. Today we see companies use a large collection of tools such as file shares, IM and video conferencing to satisfy these needs. With sufficient team commitment this works, but there are many risks and pitfalls.

Ever since I started to think about collaboration tools years ago the idea stuck that there should be better tools. Now I have founded a company, Share Square in the firm belief that our world is changing and we can create better collaboration tools.

Share Square is a shared online digital pinboard that enables project groups to collaboratively share and organize information. It makes documents such as word, pdf and ppt visual and lets people organize them visually, add post-its and sketch like with a real pinboard. It creates awareness by showing which documents were edited by whom and allows powerful communication by allowing people to point to shared information in real-time. 

This article is written by Thatcher Peskens and published in Turn The Page - Studievereniging I.D.