Digital collaboration in design education: how online collaborative software changes the practices and places of learning

ABSTRACT

This article provides a snapshot of the digital collaboration practices in a postgraduate master programme studio, focused on service and interaction design. It presents and discusses research from a student survey focused on evaluating the usefulness of the online collaborative software (OCS) ‘Slack’ and how it relates to a broader media ecology, which is comprised of contemporary and legacy computer digital technologies, including smartphone applications and email. Affordance theory and the concept of polymedia are combined to account both for the inherent capacities of new communication technologies used in the learning context, and their relational, contingent aspects, which are given shape as part of complex and context-specific communicative practices. In conclusion, it is suggested that there is much potential for further research into how the changing boundaries between everyday life and work – in part a consequence of OCS and mobile computing – are also changing the way students communicate with each other and educators.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital collaboration
• affordance
• online collaborative software
• Slack
• design education

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their insightful comments which have improved the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by the Australian Technology Network of Universities, under the project Digital Work Practices: where are the jobs, what are they, and how prepared are graduates?.