I mean, you can certainly represent more scales digitally, but you are pan-and-zooming all the time. Scaling is a problem in than nothing on a monitor seems to work as well on multiple scales as a big ass whiteboard. Maybe because they were in a different physical space, so when eyes were focused on the drawing, there wasn't really much connection (other than audio) Oddly (perhaps?) some of the team were very self-conscious about drawing while others watched, more so than in person.Īfter a while we realized that some of the team was disengaging from the rest of conversation while sketching, in a way that noodling on paper didn't' seem to. Some people found the tools really pretty usable, so for them it was great for drawing a quick sketch and sharing with people, but it was always a bit clunky compared to physical pens. We never found a workflow that fully replaced taking turns drawing on a (shared) whiteboard. Certainly among the smaller businesses I tend to work with, I could imagine any remote conferencing tool that got that right first would rapidly expand its market share.

I suspect there’s a significant opportunity here, a chance to fix one of the legitimate criticisms of WFH. Extra points if they can effectively use tablets (thinking Wacom not iPad here) so everyone can just sketch out ideas quickly and collaboratively again, and if it also provides useful and rapidly accessible tools for things like saving interesting work, editing and moving things around, and retrieving something you were looking at earlier in the discussion. I hope the next generation of conferencing apps will provide shared “whiteboard” spaces as standard. The practical utility of just having a huge whiteboard on the wall that everyone can see with a bunch of different coloured pens that anyone can pick up is enormous. I’m a big fan of remote working in general but with current tools we’ve definitely lost something in this area. Drawing diagrams takes for-fricken-ever so people tend not to do it in meetings. This doesn’t happen (IME) with remote work. One thing I miss about in-office work is that people would spontaneously draw diagrams in meetings. When somebody starts making changes to a diagram in a remote meeting, it’s a sign you’re going to be there for a long, long time. It really lacks the collaborative value of someone walking up to the whiteboard and saying “what if we did this,” not hesitating to make changes because they can do it in ten seconds and then wipe out their changes and redraw the original in few seconds if they want. Best case, someone shows up with a diagram, and it stays up while people talk about different ways of doing it, and after the meeting someone makes the changes that were suggested. It was like a tribe singing the same songs over and over again, trying out variations and evolving the “official” version over time. And everybody did it, so everybody was rehearsing the architecture in their heads and had a basic grasp of it. The same diagrams would get drawn over and over again, evolving. For this reason I love drawing diagrams on whiteboards and absolutely hate taking the step of putting them into a wiki/README/etc.

Architectural programs diagrams