On the spectrum of design conception and development, we find the following two scenarios:

• The designer is at the center of the design conception process, solely responsible for conceiving and controlling the entire design approach. This individualistic approach is common in fashion design and architecture, where the brand of the individual designer is a major selling point of the resulting experience.
  The designer researches the product and user context and then forms a design vision, that is heavily influenced by the designer's biases, preferences, style, and methods of work. In a way, the client is seeking in the designer a transcendental quality that differentiates that designer's work from that of numerous others operating in the same industry. In this scenario, the individual designer is a celebrity, and in a way, so also is the experience--people desire designer products, after all.
• Collaborative design is on the other end of that spectrum; the designer's individuality is less dominant, and the design is not an extension of the designer's ego. Instead, the designer partners with relevant project stakeholders and potential users of the product--all typically nondesigners--to work jointly on the design.
  The designer still owns the process and is responsible for facilitating collaborative design sessions, curating ideas and feedback from the team and iterating the evolving design in prototypes and other forms.

In practice, variations on both scenarios take place but, regardless, the contribution and influence of nondesigners can be significant, and several questions typically follow:

• Why bother with a designer on the team, if the end result is based on so much influence from non-designers? In other words, can business people who collaborate only with engineers be successful?
• How can a designer be successful if non-designers continuously muddle with the design?
• Is there a risk that the inclusion of non-designers will limit innovative experience concepts due to their lack of design experience?

Generally, however, practice shows that collaborative design can be extremely successful if managed correctly; to begin with, collaboration rules, their purpose to establish a clear understanding of who is responsible for what, and expectations as to the degree to which the designer needs to actually implement the feedback from participants in the design should be set.

Collaborative design is potentially more time-consuming; the designer needs to develop and coordinate workshops--not an easy task when busy stakeholders are involved. Activities need to be guided and facilitated in order to be productive and avoid wasting the teams' valuable time.

Another argument in support of collaborative design is that the final experience approach benefits from real-time inputs from people who are closely familiar with the product, and provide the designer with critiques and advice regarding constraints and opportunities that the designer is not aware of.

There are risks to both design scenarios. In the "celebrity designer" model, influential designers often conceive stunning revolutionary design approaches, and yet there is a risk that the design will lead to the failure of the final product, because the designs masks critical business or technical issues.

The following image includes several examples of striking designs by top architects. For a variety of reasons, these designs, despite the success of the experience they generated, were very problematic for the clients who paid for the design. Of course, many of the works by these designers did turn out to be a success.

The risks in collaborative design are often related to the unpredictability of working with non-designers, on tasks that depend on some familiarity with design iteration. For example, designers are trained and experienced in extrapolating the final look and feel and interaction patterns of raw drafts. They work from an almost abstract high level as they introduce more details. Many non-designers need the small details in order to get the intent and full potential of the object. As a result, the designer might be forced to get into detailed design work well before the basic concept has matured enough.