A little while ago, I watched this music documentary “It Might Get Loud”. It got me thinking a bit. What if we experimented with designing products the way these musicians make music? It should be an expressive, creative, exploratory, shared process. And have fun while we are doing it! It made me think about how we do things when designing and how it could be more fun and possibly more prolific.
For a while now at work, we have had these things we call “design sprints”. It comes from agile software development methods, and we have certainly taken creative license with the term. A design sprint at work is a little different. Essentially, for many teams, it’s now any small group focused on a specific goal for a few days, avoiding other distractions. I think they work great for a lot of things and commend all of Jake Knapp’s and several others’ great work on them. I have done several with him and on my own, and they can really work for many things.
However, I think we need a few more tools. They’re great for a lot of things when run well. But perhaps not the only way to go when you need to break out of the local maximum. Also, like a lot of terms that catch on, it gets misused, distorted, and watered down to mean a whole bunch of other things. So, a design sprint, at least in the company I work for now, could mean almost anything from just a simple brainstorming session to locking a…
