Incredible design process.

Bang & Olufsen design team avoids meetings/process and "sculpts" products little by little - (37signals)

David Lewis, Bang & Olufsen’s chief designer, discusses the company’s unusual approach to design with The Wall Street Journal.

Along the way he reveals the pioneering B&O design team only spends 2-3 days a month at B&O headquarters and works externally the rest of the time, they never meet, they have no fixed process, and they build initial versions of products out of cardboard and paper.

It's amazing to me that a company netting more than 927 million USD in revenue having more than 2500 employees could work this way, but it's becoming less surprising the more I learn about creative companies.

The line from the interview that stuck out to me was this:

This is not just my way of working. All designers for B&O — not
just me and my team of six — are external. The company believes in it.
My six-member team aside, designers for B&O don’t ever meet, we
don’t have any cooperation with one another at all.

Wow, when developers do it, they call them cowboys or lone wolves (with negative connotations), but how much richer would the product be if we approached it as designers crafting something lasting instead of carpenters building something functional? Software can have style in a major way and that style can effect uptake, just look at the beating Apple is giving to Microsoft in the small/independent/open source developer world. There's room for indie, even in the corporate world. Big business doesn't have to mean traditional business.

Not to get too off track, but I've got to point again to Richard Gabriel's admonition that developers be writers of software, not merely coders. An amazing idea if you have a moment to read it. Beauty is possible in code as in life.