In this edition of CoDesign the contributions show the highly nuanced nature of the issues that CoDesign contributors address and remind us that the best research comes from the enquiring minds of researchers who are open to what the data has to say. The result may be a questioning of assumptions and unpacking of generalisations which otherwise obscure important subtleties. Only by such strategy will we make progress in our fields through research which will provide new insights.
Buur and Larsen of the SPIRE research centre (www.sdu.dk/SPIRE) describe work which precisely exemplifies the value of questioning assumptions that, though they may be held valid in some time and place, should by no means be left to lie as unchallenged universals, applicable in all circumstances. They question assumptions surrounding consensus as a participation goal. In particular the notion that consensus in participatory engagement is to be achieved via judicious design of the engagement so that power imbalances are addressed and compensated for such that, ultimately, dialogue where differences are creatively explored leads to consensual outcomes. In contrast to seeking to view inevitable conflict as something to be confronted and overcome, these authors probe how conflict in a participatory setting might support emergence of a new meaning that can be construed as innovation. Working at the context of seeking to stimulate innovation, and using improvised theatre as the source of their data, they identify a series of conversation qualities that make conflict into a resource for innovation.
Pei, Campbell and Evans, on the other hand, take the more well-travelled path towards consensus building in collaboration: they seek to facilitate the development of shared understandings during new product development (NPD). The novelty in their work is rather to pay attention to two particular groups of designers whose different assumptions, concerns, skills and knowledge are often conflated and thus overlooked. They focus on collaboration between industrial designers and engineering designers. Starting from the premise that successful NPD rests on multi-disciplinary collaboration, they pay close attention to the differences between the two communities in terms of professional practices, values and principles and their distinct ways of using representations of all kinds at different stages of the design process. They use a comprehensive set of design representations identified from prior studies, setting these in the broader context of their own empirical work which attends to the different roles, uses and values of these representations to each community. As a result, they are able to draw out distinctions, which, though they may appear subtle, account for misunderstandings which may be critical over the life of a new product development project. They propose a tool to support collaboration which focuses on clarifying and making explicit the understanding to each community by the other in relation to the design representations in use.
Dindler's paper returns us to a theatrical and participatory setting. Here, attention is focused on participatory design and in particular participants' conceptions of the design space. Dindler is also concerned with how established views and conventions can be brought into question; in this case how participants themselves can be drawn towards expanding their notions of what constitutes the design space. Conjectural thinking is encouraged through game playing and the use of props which together may be combined to create and then explore fictional spaces. The approach of constructing fictional spaces is exemplified via a study of the design of museum exhibition spaces.
Thus, each of the papers in this issue takes a different perspective on critiques assumptions, but all of the work does this in the common interest of uncovering something new and of potential value to our understanding of engagement with each other in designing.