Jonathan Notaro Explores Advancements in Design Collaboration

“We all feel it: Everything is accelerating.

There was a period — okay, a moment — in the early 2000s when we thought technology would make our jobs exponentially easier. But that’s not quite what happened. Yes, technology has solved many problems, but it has also heightened our need to approach it proactively and not passively. Timelines have gotten shorter, and the workday never seems to come to a definitive end. We exist in an accelerating evolution, aided by technology capable of its own upgrades, imagining how it could be improved with little input from us.

This may feel disconcerting to anyone who can remember life before smartphones. At the same time, advancements such as collaborative tools have become a sweet spot for a generation of designers raised on digital devices, social media, and multiplayer video games — fully accepting of the Internet of Things and the visibility that comes with it. And that’s why we, as creative mentors, ought to lean into that.

The tools for collaboration have come so far in such a short while. This is due primarily to — sorry to bring it up, but it’s true — the pandemic. No tech can faultlessly emulate in-person tone and body language. We quickly realised that Google workspace, Office suite, or whatever it’s called this week, though essential, was still limited. Enter next-gen collaboration software: oodles of new programs that we quickly integrated into our workflow.”

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