Riff off somebody's work

To “riff off” (not to be confused with to “rip off”) somebody else’s work is a term that I have yet to encounter in a design context. It is a term that is often associated with music, and especially jazz, where a musician gets inspired by what another musician is playing, and adds something to that. It’s a spur-of-the-moment thing. “Ah that’s nice, I see what you’re trying to do. Well what if I do this?”. It’s based on your gut feeling combined with years of experience, it’s where ideas are born.

When designing something, to me this is the essence of collaboration. Design is a collective effort. Designing alone is orders of magnitude harder than designing together, especially if you are designing together with great designers. That live, in-the-moment collaboration, where someone is working on a design - you take it and build upon it - and as you do it they start to complete your ideas and build upon them - is what quick iteration should look like. It’s the hard opposite of dead-staring at a screen trying to come up with something. Instead it’s little jolts of inspiration that push you to put something down, even if it were just to get the other parties inspired again. To me, it is one of the closest experiences of the magic of designing.