Stone Soup

Image from NY mag
http://nymag.com/

The principle and idea behind Stone Soup is: 'the more people the better.' The more ideas that are thrown around by people with different perspectives and backgrounds, the more unique and multifaceted the final product will be. In the design world working together has to be important. When you design, you are designing for an audience, not yourself.

Pixar animation studios employs the 'Stone Soup' technique in their creative processes. In every little aspect on feature films the folks at Pixar collaborate. In the book To Infinity and Beyond: A Story of Pixar Animation Studios, I read about the way Pixar handles the processes of writing a story, designing characters, designing mood colors, backgrounds, and even designing the animated action and emotion of the characters in the film. These different aspects are gone over everyday with many artists, directors, story board artists, animators, and even the technical programmers. They are critiqued, analyzed, challenged and improved. Pixar does not miss a chance for greatness by confining any person to any role. They utilize the creativity in every single member of their unique team in every aspect of their film making.

The people of Pixar also know that they do need to please themselves as well. They need to remember who they are and the job they are doing, and not get too caught up in pleasing everyone else. By having a team they have a good balance of critique and unification. They have a common goal with different ideas about how to get there. The best ideas make it to the end, but most of those are combinations of many different people as they feed off of one another to create something brilliant. Stone Soup is the heartiest soup there is.