Documenting tension

Textile 2023 week 51 note

At Textile, designing how we design and develop is an ongoing process, which is how it should be. Just as we iterate and refine software, we do the same with how we work, constantly tweaking and adjusting how the parts of the organisation move with and complement one another. Part of this involves writing. We work completely remote and largely asynchronously, and therefore need to document well and often. Also because of this we need to approach tensions and how to best solve them in a different way. We write out tension documents to explain tensions we might feel and then at least one if not many proposal documents, with owners and timelines, which present options as to how to address them. The result is that often, what we design and develop starts with writing which forces us to think things through clearly and take time doing so rather than call endless meeting without unambiguous resolutions.