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tags: Garden Crew
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# Design Philosophy

## Why We're Writing Down Our Design Philosophy

- so we, the crew, are all on the same page
- to attract, delight and engage with the best and brightest designers, artists, technologists, salespeople, marketers, etc.
- to publish to the world, to demonstrate our prowess and to impress potential customers

## Design Principles

- we have a very clear and very opinionated approach
- context sensitivity - design principles adjust to suit the realm of the customer

## Working Around The World

### Principles

1. We respect each other's time. People need to sleep, eat, and have a life. We don't schedule over their life events.
2. Asynchronous collaboration is the norm. Synchronous meetings between more than 2 or 3 people need to be a special, positive experience.
3. We all communicate in UTC, rather than local time or summer/winter time.
4. Our work is chunked to follow the sun, to gain virtuous productivity.
- Each unit of work needs to be small enough for completion within a day (if there's a handoff around the sun), or within a known series of days if not.
- Each unit of work needs to have a rubric or plan B for work that might be dependent on the availability and reliability of others in the production chain.
- The person handing off, and the person handed to, know when the handoff needs to happen. They know this at least 24 hours before the handoff needs to happen.
- Central task allocation supports flexible use of the time leading up to a deadline; this implies active project management as an assigned role or explicit agreement between team members to cover that role

### Tools

- We use wikis and other tools to collaborate in written artifacts.
- We use (TBD, Miro?) to collaborate on visual and mapping artifacts.
- We use (TBD, Figma) to collaborate on visual interace design.
- We use HackMD for real-time editing collaboration.
- We use HackMD as an ephemeral editing tool, moving notes in and out via paste (in) and download to Markdown (out). We know that HackMD can sync with one page on GitHub, but it's clunky, and can only be synced by the HackMD doc's owner.
- We use Airtable for data.
- We use written and other visual artifacts as core communication, rather than speech. We use speech as ephemeral, higher-bandwidth communication, but it's not good for handoffs.
- We use calendars to understand when people are available.
- We use calendar access tools (like Calendly and AppointmentThing) to help access everybody's calendars.
- (WISH) We have tools that automatically examine multiple calendars to find free times.
- We have recommended tools to help team members understand and manage time zones