Manifestos/Principles
Design Archaeology
Teams take apart 8-12 designs they admire and work out the choices behind each one, turning "we like this" into "here's why it works." They leave with 15-20 design principles, each backed by an example and sorted into themes.
Duration
2.5 hours
Group Size
12-20
Category
Manifestos/Principles
Difficulty
Easy
Select 8-12 exemplar designs representing quality standards, ensuring diversity. Deconstruct each systematically to identify underlying principles and patterns. Extract 15-20 reusable principles clear enough to guide new decisions. Organize principles into a framework showing relationships and application.
- Historical context for current design patterns.
- Understanding of why things are the way they are.
- Informed decisions about what to preserve or change.
Before the session, curate excellent, diverse exemplars. Avoid only trendy examples. During facilitation, push past 'I like this' to 'why it works.' Demand specificity and prevent endless wordsmithing. Warning signs: Principles that describe surface features, principles all from one exemplar, vague principles, or more debating than analyzing. Success indicators: 15-20 specific, actionable principles, evidence-grounded, challenging current approaches, organized framework, and team excitement. After the session, document with exemplar evidence. Create a visual guide. Use it to evaluate work. Schedule periodic archaeological sessions. Use it when a team needs design direction or keeps debating approaches without shared standards. If a team writes a principle that only describes the surface, such as "uses lots of white space", ask what problem that choice solves for the person using it, and write that down instead. Remotely, put each exemplar in its own frame on a shared Miro or Mural board, run the analysis in breakout rooms of three or four, and have each team paste its principles onto one shared frame before the share-out.
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