Socio-Constructivist Account of Collaboration in Concept Design

Designing progresses through continuous refinement of models. In today's design practice, these models get created and refined by multi-cultural, multidisciplinary teams that speak different languages, whether these languages are spoken language, disciplinary, or organizational language. When these people come together, they create, negotiate, evolve, and manage a nascent language with which they communicate the meaning of the product they design. The nascent language is a pidgin articulated through cognitive artifacts. Thus their role is essential to designing and their management is critical to successful completion of the process. In contrast, their mismanagement quickly presents itself as design failures, sometimes catastrophic. Given their role, it is critical to understand what cognitive artifacts are, how they are constructed, and how they should be managed. This marks a shift from focusing on the artifact to the process of designing as a social, negotiated process. Such a view results in conceiving designing as a complex and emergent process with implications for design research, practice and pedagogy.

Routledge eBooks, 2022

The concept of 'Scandinavian design' has had a strong presence in design history, establishing the Nordic countries' international reputation for designing sensible and elegant everyday goods since the mid-20th century (Halén and Wickman 2003; Fiell et al. 2017). However, there is another kind of 'Scandinavian design' that holds an equally strong conceptual presence in much of contemporary design practice and design research, while being practically invisible in design history. This latter 'Scandinavian design tradition' refers to a way of designing, rather than to a certain aesthetic. This collaborative design approach-often with political and democratic aims-emerged in the Nordic countries around the 1970s, bringing designers and non-designers together in the process of designing (Simonsen and Robertson 2013). While ideas and aesthetics of 'Scandinavian design' have been critically re-visited in Nordic design history (Fallan 2012), the histories of the 'Scandinavian design tradition' as referred to in user-centred and participatory design practices remain largely untold. Considering the substantial impact that Scandinavian user-centred design continues to have in contemporary collaborative design practices, the absence of attention to its origins in design history is noteworthy. Why is it that user-centred designwith rare exceptions-has not been included in design history? To be fair, this is not only an issue for Nordic design history (Auricchio and Göransdotter 2021). There may of course be several interlinked explanations for these design historical gaps. Let us here consider two probable reasons: Design history has often tended to favour outlooks relating to the meanings, impacts and aesthetics of designed things, rather than how designing itself has changed in terms of methods or meanings. Another possible-and reasonable-explanation could be linked to a lack of design historical source materials. Where would one find archives and publications from which to draw forth histories that go beyond what changed in terms of design outcomes, and that speak to why and how collaborative design methods were actively sought and developed? The efforts made to rethink , and reshape , what designing could be, through seeking methods for collaborative design have left few written traces explicitly addressing this as design methodology development. In the following, video recordings of public talks and interviews with design practitioners active in Sweden in the 1960s through 1980s form a starting point in the search for histories of Scandinavian designing.

2012

The author has granted a non exclusive license allowing Library and Archives Canada to reproduce, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, communicate to the public by telecommunication or on the Internet, loan, distrbute and sell theses worldwide, for commercial or non commercial purposes, in microform, paper, electronic and/or any other formats. AVIS: L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public par telecommunication ou par I'lnternet, preter, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou autres formats. Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu manquant.

Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Requirements Engineering, 1996

The conceptual design of software involves the analysis of requirements, functional specification, and architectural design. Despite the recent interest in supporting the software development process, conceptual design remains a largely informal and little understood activity. We studied the conceptual design activities of a representative industrial software project, Centauri, for three months with follow-up observations and discussions over the following six months. Our goal was to understand how patterns of collaboration and communication in project teams affect the convergence of the project on a common vision and a documented specification. In this paper, we present our research methodology and findings, and the implications of the results for process and tool support. The following observations stand out. First, convergence on a common system vision was painfully slow. The major impediment to faster progress was the difficulty that the project team had in making critical allocation and interface design decisions. Second, Centauri project members repeatedly raised certain issues and failed to reach closure on key problems. Finally, we observed a persistent tension between the desire on behalf of nearly all project members to follow a proceduralized development process and the urgency of delivering a working product. This tension manifested itself in the creation of ad hoc processes and various dysfunctional displacement activities. Although our findings are rooted in the specific context of a single project, we believe they are of general import, and discuss their implications in the light of comparable findings in other studies.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012

This paper shows that understanding collaborative design goes beyond analyzing group dynamics, tasks' repartitions or negotiation during decision-making processes. During the preliminary phases of design, the intentions of a designer are mainly supported by its sketches and more particularly by specific graphic units inside those sketches. Inside a controlled setting, twelve professional designers are asked to express, share, capture or interpret sketches. A qualitative and quantitative fine-grained analysis of strokes teach us • how designers tend to deal with representations that are not theirs, as in an ecological collaborative situation;

2004

This communication describes an experimentation of co-design carried out between two teams of French and Thai nationalities. The objective of this collaboration is to design an exhibition of work from CRAI at the Art Gallery of Rangsit University (Thailand). We describe here the setting up of this collaboration (objectives, stakes) as well as its progress. This project enables us to apprehend the cooperative dimension of a design project, and particularly its sociological aspects. We describe also the tools implemented to assist the collaborative activities (discussions, file sharing, etc.). The characteristic of our experiment is the geographical and cultural distance of our two teams. The difficulties related to this distance enabled us to see how the tools can assist the actors in their co-operative tasks.

Landscape Journal 24(2): 125-135. , 2005

This article examines the development and outcomes of a collaborative design studio involving two groups of landscape architecture students in Japan and the United States. Through both virtual (online) and real (face-to-face) interactions, participating students jointly developed urban design proposals for two respective local neighborhoods in Matsudo and Seattle. The challenges for the studio included communicating across cultural, geographic, and technological barriers, as well as more subtle differences in design culture and approach. These barriers and challenges present a stark contrast to the seamless space of flows that often characterize the globalized network of transactions and communication. In analyzing the studio outcomes and pedagogical lessons, the article explores the complementarities of online collaboration and cross-cultural learning. Specifically, it examines the mechanisms of cross-cultural learning in an online environment and the processes through which cross-cultural learning open the windows for a critical understanding of the socio-cultural processes of design in the digital and network age.

Proceedings of the 15th Annual Conference of the Association of Researchers in construction management, 1999

This paper will describe current research work to study the conceptual design activity of interdisciplinary teams. It will describe two recent design workshops that were held to allow real-time design activity to be monitored and mapped, and a preliminary conceptual design framework to be tested. The findings of the workshop highlight the iterative nature of conceptual design activity and provide much needed insights into the ways in which interdisciplinary teams progress during the early phases of design. Keywords: conceptual ...