How to discuss design without losing your mind

Real critique has become a lost skill. Critique is intended to help teams strengthen their designs, products, and services, not allow individual members to assert authority or push agendas under the guise of feedback. Adam Connor and Aaron Irizarry discuss what critique really is and explain how to give it, get it, and use it to improve your teams designs, communication, and collaboration.

Collaboration requires us to share our work, communicate our ideas, and collect each other’s thoughts in order to understand whether the designs we’re producing meet the objectives of a given project. But we often wrestle with collecting feedback. We get comments that are less than helpful because they are irrelevant or unclear, or we find that we’re getting feedback and reactions at inopportune times, rather than at points in the process where they would have been useful in informing design decisions. Our ability to critique speaks directly to the quality of the conversations we have with teammates, whether they are designers, developers, stakeholders, etc. Real critique is intended to help teams strengthen their designs, products, and services, not allow individual members to assert authority or push agendas under the guise of “feedback.” Designers frequently complain about the quality and usefulness of the feedback they are given, but we rarely examine our own processes to identify how to collect useful feedback and make critiques of our designs more productive. Adam Connor and Aaron Irizarry explore critique as both an activity and an aspect of any communication or collaboration. Attendees will learn what separates critique from other forms of feedback, best practices for giving and receiving critique, tools for focusing and facilitating discussions (even with challenging participants), where and when critique falls within a project’s timeline, and how to use critique to build not only stronger designs, but stronger collaboration.