Design by committee

Design by committee is a pejorative term for a project that has many designers involved but no unifying plan or vision.

Usage of the term

The term is used to refer to suboptimal traits that such a process may produce as a result of having to compromise between the requirements and viewpoints of the participants, particularly in the presence of poor leadership or poor technical knowledge, such as needless complexity, internal inconsistency, logical flaws, banality, and the lack of a unifying vision. This democratic design process is in contrast to autocratic design, or design by dictator, where the project leader decides on the design. The difference is that in an autocratic style, members of the organizations are not included and the final outcome is the responsibility of the leader.

The term is especially common in technical parlance; and stresses the need for technical quality over political feasibility. The proverb "too many cooks spoil the broth" expresses the same idea.

The term is commonly used in information and communications technology, especially when referring to the design of languages and technical standards, as demonstrated by USENET archives.[1]

An example of a technical decision said to be a typical result of design by committee is the Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) cell size of 53 bytes. The choice of 53 bytes was political rather than technical.[2] When the CCITT was standardizing ATM, parties from the United States wanted a 64-byte payload. Parties from Europe wanted 32-byte payloads. Most of the European parties eventually came around to the arguments made by the Americans, but France and a few others held out for a shorter cell length of 32 bytes. A 53-byte size (48 bytes plus 5 byte header) was the compromise chosen.

The term is also common in other fields of design such as graphic design, architecture or industrial design. In automotive design, this process is often blamed for unpopular or poorly designed cars.[3]

An example described as naming by community was a school near Liverpool formed by the merger of several other schools: it was officially named the "Knowsley Park Centre for Learning, Serving Prescot, Whiston and the Wider Community" in 2009, listing as a compromise all the schools and communities merged into it.[4] The name lasted seven years before its headmistress, who called the name "so embarrassing"[5] cut it to simply "Prescot School".[6][7]

Aphorisms

One maxim is that a camel is a horse designed by committee; this phrase has appeared in use in the United States as early as the 1950s.

See also

References
  1. Occurrences of "Design by committee" in Google Groups USENET archives, 1981–1992
  2. D. Stevenson, "Electropolitical Correctness and High-Speed Networking, or, Why ATM is like a Nose", Proceedings of TriCom '93, April 1993.
  3. Biggest Automaker Needs Big Changes
  4. Turner, Ben. "Knowsley school to have one of "longest names in the world"". Liverpool Echo. Retrieved 2 December 2017.
  5. Boffey, Daniel. "Can a new drive change the fortunes of schools in one of Britain's most deprived areas?". The Guardian. Retrieved 2 December 2017.
  6. Cobain, Ian. "The making of an education catastrophe – schools in Knowsley were dubbed 'wacky warehouses'". The Guardian. Retrieved 2 December 2017.
  7. "Lessons to be learned from Knowsley's schools (letters)". The Guardian. Retrieved 2 December 2017.
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