Intro

Lori is a designer with broad interests in installation art, engineering design and service design. Designing the user experience across hardware and software is her expertise, and she can always bring different perspectives for clients.

Structure

Lori is working as a design consultant in a company with clients across the whole world. She works closely with PMs (Project Managers), POs (Product Owners), engineers and sometimes specialists from various backgrounds, such as finance, insurance or healthcare. The team size can vary from a compact team of 3 to a group of 40 members. Also, within the company, there are hundreds of designers who are willing to share their experience and skills to help each other.

Pair design practice

While using the pair design method within the team, designers and clients are arranged to work hand-in-hand: clients work with designers to define the requirements or the expectation; designers work with clients to visualise the experience. Clients provide required information and technique or resource limitations, and then design consultants manage to produce outcomes together with clients.

When not to use pair design

From Lori’s perspective, pair design does not work if the people in the pairing do not have the same understanding of how it works. A common misconception is that it is simply a way to divide works between designers.

Networking

Lori emphasises that networking is critical, especially when working in a large company. Finding a designer you can collaborate with is not easy, and it takes time to learn from each other. Internal networking becomes extremely important if you want to make your project go smoothly. Networking can bring opportunities to meet designers who have a similar mindset to yours, and project information that you need. This is the way to spot a potential pairing partner.

Lori strongly believes that with a great pairing partner, you can run your project much more effectively because you can shorten the time spent adjusting the way you collaborate with each other, especially when the project is urgent and time is a luxury to your team.

Key takeaways

• Divide work between team members is NOT pair design - it’s a way to collaborate with each other.

• Make sure you align pair design expectations - team members should be drawing the same picture of how pair design will work and understanding how they want to contribute.

• Keep your network going - expanding your resource and connection pool is a great method for long-term development.