If you’ve ever heard of agile modelling, you’ll already be aware of the advantages. If not, you’re in for a treat. Agile design principles will help you, as a talented designer, maximise the effectiveness and efficiency of your workload. Agility will help you please your clients and delight every kind of stakeholder. Saving time means saving money, which is always good news for any business. And it’s also an excellent framework for minimising mistakes, organising yourself and your projects, and keeping everything running smoothly. Let’s take a good look at the agile design process in a SketchUp world. By the end of this article you’ll understand what it is, why it matters, how to do it for yourself, and the most important best practices for designing in an agile way.
What is Agile Design?
It’s always best to begin with the basics. So what is agile design? In a nutshell, agile modelling principles give you a useful iterative framework for you to develop your designs faster and better.
In our world the word ‘iterative’ means repeating a sequence of instructions until you reach a predefined end result. Every time you complete the steps of a sequence in a given order, you’ve completed an iteration. When you carry out a series of trial-and-error style cycles, adjusting a design according to what you learned during the previous iteration, the creative process is formalised without affecting your creativity. You refine your work in a logical way through repetition, moving continuously towards your goal. It’s a great way to work for everyone involved, from designer to client.
The agile design process is highly collaborative. It creates a fast-paced and exciting working environment where big tasks are broken down into manageable chunks, each dealt with or ‘actioned’ in short time periods called sprints. A sprint can last days or weeks.
As you can imagine, agile methodology’s iterative framework is an excellent fit with software development, and just as good for the kind of work SketchUp users do. The business benefits are well worth having: fast feedback, appropriate customer involvement, easy change management, and great team motivation.
Agile Design Process and Principles
Next, let’s explore the agile design process and the associated agile design principles. The agile design process involves a series of logical phases:
- Understand
- Research
- Sketch
- Design
- Prototype
- Test
- Refine
The idea at the core of agile working is that you forget about perfection, and it’s actually liberating. In agile methodology it’s more important to make progress than have endless lengthy discussions. The emphasis is on building, testing and iterating solutions instead of getting mired in endless talk.
And how about agile design principles? While many of the ideas behind agile modelling specifically relate to software and website development, it’s easy to see how they apply perfectly to the work our users do.
For a start you model with a purpose. You’re not confused about the project and your role in it. You have a specific purpose, which helps drive you in the right direction. Embracing change is a key principle, since the goals and requirements will change as the project evolves. Every aspect of the project might change over time, and that’s fine. Incremental change is usually easier to handle than big, sudden changes, and that’s an agile way to work.
When you assume the best solution will almost always be the simplest, you’re engaging in agile thinking. Agile designers keep their modelling simple so it’s easier to re-think future requirements without problems. And because your goals are small and incremental, the next goal is always front-of-mind. Quality work sits at the heart of all this, which means you meet people’s expectations more efficiently. There’s no rushed work. And the fast feedback agile demands is also a big advantage too, keeping your project firmly on the rails and heading in the right direction.
Agile working involved just enough documentation rather than drowning in too much paperwork or struggling to understand too little of it. You keep stakeholders in the loop, with incremental decisions to make along the way. Every piece of documentation is worth having.
Tips for Agile Design and Modelling in SketchUp
SketchUp supports the agile design process beautifully. It enables collaboration perfectly, one of the most important basics of the agile method. SketchUp Viewer’s collaboration features let groups of people experience SketchUp projects using immersive virtual and augmented reality devices. Members of the group can join in with collaboration sessions via a local Wi-Fi network or do it remotely over the web. When collaborating in a room, the owner of the room is the presenter, the rest are attendees, not unlike the software so many of us used to stay in touch during the pandemic. You even have your own avatar to show who you are, and where you are in the virtual project related to everyone else. It isn’t just useful, it’s great fun.
SketchUp also supports the iteration that sits at the heart of agile design. The Purge Unused command, for example, gets rid of all the unwanted Components, Styles, Layers, and Materials you’ve deleted. Importing Components by downloading them from the 3D warehouse speeds up your workflow no end, feeding into effective iteration. Agile experts recommend considerate component selection, where you pick the smallest file size and edge count for design efficiency. Turning off ‘Shadows’ and ‘Fog’ makes your modelling more efficient and the process less sluggish. When you save your interim working scenes without shadows or fog, you maximise your efficiency. As long as you always have the latest updated version of SketchUp, agile working will be yours for the taking.
If you’d like to delve deeper, there’s lots of information about maximising your efficiency here, in an article about SketchUp best practices and applied principles.
Agile Modelling Best Practices
You’ll want to know about the best practices for agile modelling and product design. Here goes. First, it’s about creating the right kind of culture where agile working can thrive and make the best impact. This means the opposite of centralised work. You need to think about a way of working that’s de-centralised, cross-departmental and self-organising, driving a culture that majors on being proactive and collaborative first and foremost.
You’ll need to establish a great strategy to unite everyone involved, an umbrella under which you all work, feeding directly into all the relevant KPIs and goals. And building focused user stories is tremendously helpful. It lets you take an essential customer perspective on the design’s context, function, and the issue it resolves. This complements your formal representation of the end-user journey from discovery to using the design.
Honest and open communications are key, especially important for successful team building. Sharing knowledge in the right way means delays are minimised and communication problems avoided. If your teams are remote it’s even more important for you all to be on the same page, all able to make any issues clear, talk about problems, and deal with potential bottlenecks, all feeding into the right stakeholders.
Working in sprints means working more like a 100m sprinter than a marathon runner. Nothing drags on longer than it needs to, you release your deliverables frequently in small chunks, and fix things as they occur. And this means you always deliver good value, every step of the way.
Agile design principles and the agile workflows you create as a result of them mean the clients and users determine a project’s success. Because agile design is centred around the product and its intended benefits to the client, they’re placed at the centre of everything – which is exactly where they belong.
Now you understand the agile design process, agile design principles and know why agile modelling is the thing to aim for. Take a look at SketchUp’s excellent collection of essential tutorials and test-drive SketchUp Pro for the full story. It’s inspiring!
