UPDATED: I added some further thoughts on why I think MB Design is being really brave

Mark Boulton and his team are the bravest designers I (don’t) know.

[stag_intro]Designers all know that design by committee doesn’t work. However, can design by community succeed? [/stag_intro]

I personally don’t know, but Mark Boulten & Leisa Reichelt intend to find out. Mark Boulten Design was recently chosen to redesign Drupal.org and to their credit, they have kept the process really transparent. That’s very difficult. I know a fair share of designers don’t work that way, because we are afraid of feedback prior to an acceptably finished product. Designers love to ruminate about all the fine details; fortify their defenses from critique—it’s part of the artist’s anguish that we go through. The overall community loves to have the “great reveal”, that WOW moment, and bask in the glory of our own genius. It typifies the reward we get when we closet our selves up to think about a problem. I’ve thought a lot about this while working in Agile environments and how different and uneasy it makes me feel (still). You feel really naked, professionally speaking. You also enjoy a freedom to make mistakes and I’ve come to realise that working in a transparent and iterative way has many benefits (engaging the wider team being the greatest).

The key thing is that as the expert, you have the final say. Through years of experience and the user research you have done to get to that point means a lot. That is what I keep telling myself.

You can see the progress of each Drupal.org iteration at their Drupal project site. Will it work? Quite frankly, I don’t know.

Looking at the response from his blog posting, there is as much significant momentum as there is resistance. Even discussion over a proposed wordmark became very heated.

However, I am sure things will work out in the end. Not because the best outcomes have occurred, but because people typically make do with what they get. That and the fact that the stuff Mark and his team will produce will no doubt be great.

Again, I think Drupal still needs to address the initial out-of-the-box experience by creating an optimized adminstration experience that isn’t tied to the public site theme. Perhaps that will be the next project for Drupal.

One thing I want to mention are the HTML wireframe prototypes Mark and his team are using. I love it. I am totally going to do something like that for future projects. One of the things that Interaction Designers have been struggling with is a lack of good tools that move pass the page-metaphor of the web (into RIA territory).