A month of designing on the road
Lisbon, Kyoto and Tasmania

In March, four of us left the Collingwood studio for a month. Megan went to Lisbon, Johnny to Kyoto, and Alisa and I shared a camper van around Tasmania. We kept our jobs, our meetings and our deadlines. This is what we learned about designing from somewhere else.

Introduction

The trip started as an operations question. A third of DrumKit already works remotely, and every few months someone asks whether they could work from overseas for a while. Rather than write a policy from the office, we decided to try it ourselves first and write the policy from what happened.

We set three rules before we left. Everyone kept at least four hours a day inside Melbourne’s working hours. Nobody missed a design review. And each of us wrote a short note every Friday about what worked and what didn’t, which is where most of this post comes from.

Time zones shaped everything. Johnny was barely out of step with Melbourne, and his month felt like working from home with better food. Megan in Lisbon overlapped with the studio for a narrow window each evening, so she moved her reviews there and did her deep work in the quiet mornings, long before anyone in Australia was awake.

That became the theme of the month. Anything written down travelled perfectly. Anything said out loud in a corridor didn’t travel at all.

In the van, the problem was not time but signal. Alisa and I learned to plan our days around towns with good coverage, to download files before a long drive, and to keep reviews asynchronous. DrumKit opens a library offline and syncs when it finds a connection, which turned out to matter more than any of us expected.

Alisa ran two rounds of customer interviews from a campsite on the Freycinet Peninsula, sitting in the front seat with a hotspot wedged against the windscreen. The recordings were fine. The kookaburras made the transcripts interesting.

Software and tools

We didn’t buy anything new for the trip. The whole kit was a laptop, headphones, a phone with a local data plan and the same tools we use in the studio every day.

What changed was how we used them. Comments replaced quick questions across a desk. Branches replaced “can you look at this now?”. Every review came with a short recorded walkthrough, so someone eleven hours away could watch it over coffee and reply in writing.

The one thing we would pack differently is a proper chair. Megan’s flat had a beautiful balcony and a kitchen stool, and by the second week her back was filing its own Friday notes. Next time the budget covers a coworking desk in any city with a long stay.

Habits we kept

By the end of the month we had a list of habits we have kept since coming home, because they made the studio better too.

1. Write every decision in the file it affects, with the reason and a name beside it.
2. Record a two-minute walkthrough for any review someone might miss.
3. Protect one overlap hour a day, and keep everything else asynchronous.

Did the work suffer? We measured what we always measure: review turnaround, handoff questions from engineering and the number of components shipped. All three held steady, and review turnaround improved, because written feedback arrived in one place instead of trickling in across a day.

What suffered a little was the chatter, the overheard conversation that turns into an idea. We haven’t solved that, and we are not sure a policy can.