Trust and Relationship Building: Critical Skills for the Future of Design Education in Online Contexts

Abstract

Could you trust someone you had never physically met to successfully collaborate with you on a design project?

As online communication technologies rapidly evolve, the creative industries continue to move towards globally networked and interdisciplinary modalities of practice. These inescapable shifts in the ways designers work have challenged many long held assumptions about the nature of individual design processes.

Such revolutionary changes mean that designers must increasingly master new skills to effectively communicate and collaborate in online environments with colleagues from different cultures, disciplines and locations world-wide. Since they may never meet face-to-face, the success of this new working methodology relies on high levels of trust between practitioners, both personally and professionally in order to achieve effective design outcomes.

In turn the need for design educators to equip students with skills to thrive in the face of this new industrial paradigm is highlighted. Trust is integral to developing the personal and professional relationship building and collaborative skills necessary for contemporary digital working practices. By being sensitive to, and cognisant of these issues, educators can initiate and implement strategies that help create the right conditions for trust to emerge between participants in online learning scenarios.

In reality however, the relative suddenness of this shift has seen some educationalists engage in unconsidered responses to this challenge. In the rush to embrace online technologies, the social and cultural dimensions of online pedagogies are often neglected while the relative functionality of digital tools and spaces is given prominence.

Drawing upon three specific case studies of very different applications of online learning in a design context, this paper aims to highlight the impact that fostering positive, interpersonal, interdisciplinary and transcultural relationships between students in online design education can have upon their levels of trust and the effectiveness and outcomes of their online collaborative processes.

The projects examined were conducted by COFA Online and The Omnium Research Group at The College of Fine Arts (COFA), University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Each case study examines particular dynamics associated with global, local and cross-cultural contexts. They include:

	• Global - Fully online Masters of Cross Disciplinary Art and Design
	• Local - Blended Learning at The College of Fine Arts
	• Cross-Cultural (Australia and China) - The Collabor8 Project, East-West online design collaboration

By triangulating data that examines student/teacher experiences through online surveys, interviews, responses to targeted online discussions and peer reviews, this paper outlines online pedagogical approaches that have successfully engaged students in active, collaborative and trust building online learning environments. It also pinpoints problems that can occur in online teamwork related to trust, communication and interpersonal relationships, and investigates several potential solutions.

If strong human-to-human relationships are seen as the foundation for effective collaborative design practice online, educators will be helping emerging generations of designers maximise their creative potential in a globally competitive market where online collaborative, cross-cultural, interdisciplinary creative skill-sets are demanded as the ‘norm’.

Keywords:

• online
• collaboration
• pedagogy
• cross-cultural
• blended learning