A Little Help from Your Friends.(Technology Information)

When Frederick Brooks delivered his Turing Award lecture, "The Design of Design," at Siggraph last year, he highlighted a concern that has become central to the debate in the mechanical design world about when Web collaboration is appropriate and when it is not. Here's an edited excerpt:

There's an old joke that a committee is a refuge from the dreariness of labor and the loneliness of thought. Well, collaboration involves a lot of meetings, and it's easy for the meetings to turn into that refuge. But there's no substitute when the smoke clears for someone going off into a corner and detailing a proposal and wrestling with the different design desiderata and constraints. Collaboration can help in determining the real needs of users because more minds ask more diverse questions. Indeed, in the brainstorming and conceptual exploration phase, more minds will come up with more radical alternatives. But not in conceptual design or detailed design. How many great novels or plays have been written by two authors? How many paintings have two painters? How many symphonies have two composers?

There's no doubt that all great works require a tremendous amount of solitary thought. And Brooks makes a compelling case that the same is true for great works of design. But situations often arise during the conceptual or detailed design process, when it is vitally important to get a little help from your friends and colleagues.

The need for outside input could arise at many points--when you are stuck on a problem, need approval, or are working on part of an assembly that connects with a part that someone else is designing. In fact, ...