Design by committee

Design by committee is a term referring to a style of design and its resultant output when a group of entities comes together to produce something (often the design of technological systems or standards), particularly in the presence of poor leadership. The defining characteristics of "design by committee" are needless complexity, internal inconsistency, logical flaws, banality, and the lack of a unifying vision.

The term is especially common in technical parlance, and it legitimizes the need and general acceptance of a unique systems architect. Often, when software is designed by a committee, the original motivation, specifications and technical criteria take a backseat and poor choices may be made merely to appease the egos of several individual committee members. Such products and standards end up doing too many things or having parts that fit together poorly (because the entities who produced those parts were unaware of each other's requirements for a good fit).

One such example was the decision for an Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) cell size of 53 bytes. The choice of 53 bytes was political rather than technical.^[1] When the CCITT was standardizing ATM, parties from the United States wanted a 64-byte payload. Parties from Europe wanted 32-byte payloads. Most of the European parties eventually came around to the arguments made by the Americans, but France and a few others held out for a shorter cell length of 32 bytes. A 53-byte size (48 bytes plus 5 byte header) was the compromise chosen. Computer and network systems typically work in 32-byte and 64-byte sizes.

The term is also common in other fields of design as graphic design, architecture or industrial design. In automotive design this process is often attributed to poorly designed or unpopular cars.^[2]

One maxim is that a camel is a horse designed by committee; this has been attributed to Vogue magazine, July 1958, to Sir Alec Issigonis and also to University of Wisconsin philosophy professor Lester Hunt.^[3]

See also

• Groupthink
• The Wisdom of Crowds

References

1. ^ D. Stevenson, "Electropolitical Correctness and High-Speed Networking, or, Why ATM is like a Nose", Proceedings of TriCom '93, April 1993.
2. ^ Biggest Automaker Needs Big Changes
3. ^ Re: A camel is a horse designed by committee

External links

• Rod Johnson explains what is wrong with design by committee in the development of Java EE