Spaceful Design Director, Michael Spinoglio, shares a personal reflection on the evolution of collaboration in design, from scribbled notepads to the digital tools we rely on today. Discover how an online collaboration platform is transforming the way we solve problems and work together with clients, no matter where we are or what time zone we’re in.
I used to scribble a lot on notepads. It started in school on the margins of books and grew into solving problems on the corners of architectural drawings with clients on site, capturing a shared vision in some tangible way and then transporting these many scraps back to the office to turn into something a bit more legible (and probably buildable).
While this was (still is) a great way of collaborating in person, we’ve come a bit further than this for our collective sanity. Modern tools like iPads enable us to draw by hand and immediately translate this into the digital sphere. However, this interface still creates a somewhat jilted dynamic between the drawer and the observer—player one and player two. Good collaboration is an environment where there is equal opportunity to co-create, and is something I was always trying to create with clients, until recently.
Miro is an online collaboration platform—imagine a whiteboard that goes on forever, or the white space from The Matrix, a place of endless possibility. The beauty of this tool is how it creates an equal platform for collaboration. I am no longer ‘the drawer’; my project team and I now collaborate together over one plan, crafting solutions in tandem through an equally intuitive tool (your mouse and your imagination). Where Teams meetings can become awkward stagings of “who’s turn is it to talk,” well-set-up digital visual collaboration is a seamless merging of ideas, no different to an infinite sheet of yellow trace on a table with many pens. The bonus is that not only is this problem solving as good as meeting in person, but we can now collaborate from anywhere to do it, and asynchronously as well (regardless of time zones).
We use these tools from the inception of any project, all the way through to completion. Our Miro boards become the meandering story of each project, an organic timeline of the many hurdles we overcame along the way. While they won’t be as iconic as the napkin sketches of Gehry or Zaha, I’ll take the more collaborative problem solving any day.
