Today, economic globalisation is creating competitive pressures on industry to innovate and to minimise the time to bring products to market. Information technologies and the World Wide Web are changing the way business enterprises work. Competing suppliers, designers, manufacturers and customers form networks of links via the Internet or traditional media in new product development where dynamics and uncertainty rule out any possibility centralised control. Collaborative design plays a key role in new product development and is being revolutionised by rapid changes in communications technology and changes in the way institutions work.
In this context two British research bodies, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) have teamed up to create a new five‐year research programmed called Designing for the 21st Century. The first phase of this programme involved the funding of twenty one research clusters around many areas of design: Design Performance, Orienting the Future: Design Strategies for Non-Place, Technology and Social Action, The Healing Environment, Understanding and Supporting Group Creativity within Design, Spatial Imagination in Design, Nature Inspired Creative Design, The Emotional Wardrobe, Spatiality in Design, Discovery in Design: People-centred Computational Environments, Design Imaging: images for communicating design ideas, problems and solutions in the 21st Century, Design Performance, Synergy Tools to Guide the Effective Development of a ‘Meta-Design’ Methodology, Digital Design, Representation, Communication & Interactions: Screens and the Social Landscape, Designing Healthy and Inclusive Public Outdoor Spaces for Young People, The View of the Child: Explorations of the Visual Culture of the Man-Made Environment, Interrogating Fashion – Practice, process and Presentation: New Paradigms in Fashion Design, Sensory Design and its Implications for Food Design and Presentation in the 21st Century, Designing Physical Artefacts from Computational Simulations and Building Computational Simulations of Physical Systems, Ideal States: Towards a Joint knowledge and Operating Framework for Design and Medical Practices, and Embracing Complexity in Design.
We were members of the Embracing Complexity in Design cluster which was based on the following assumptions: (1) Many designed products and systems are inherently complex, e.g. aeroplanes, buildings, cities, microchips, information systems, manufacturers, organisations, (2) Designers need to understand the complex dynamic processes used to fabricate and manufacture products and systems: design, products and processes co-evolve, (3) The social and economic context of design is complex, embracing market economics, legal regulation, social trends, mass culture, fashion, and much more, and (4) the process of designing can involve complex social dynamics, with many people processing and exchanging complex heterogeneous information over complex human and communication networks, in the context of many changing constraints.
In the future things will increasingly be designed collaboratively. Design participants such as marketing researchers, stylists, engineers, customers, component suppliers may be distributed geographically over the world, belonging to different organisations with intricate organizational, technological and financial meta-systems operating under dynamic market conditions and uncertain business circumstances. Collaborative design systems are typically heterogeneous and very dynamic, involving complex interactions among many humans, applications, services, devices, and many changing constraints.
This special issue is based on the International workshop on “Exploring Complexity in Collaborative Design and Solutions” held in July 2005 at Brunel University, which was an event in the programme of Designing for the 21st Century Cluster: Embracing Complexity in Design (http://www.complexityanddesign.net/). The workshop aimed to explore complexity in collaborative design, review current practices in industry and scientific research, discuss possible solutions within complex systems science and computing technologies and investigate what the emerging science of complex systems can contribute to the theory and practice of collaborative design. One of the great benefits of our cluster was that it attracted a great variety of members from inside and outside the design community, including engineers, architects, town planners, artists, mathematicians, social scientists, and practising designers. The following five papers selected from the workshop included in this special issue reflect this diversity.
In the first paper Johnson suggests that the complexity science approach can provide useful insights into the structure of communication in collaborative design. It introduces some features and concepts of complex systems and discusses their relevance to design such as dynamics and emergence. It also proposes a multilevel multidimensional network structure for representing part-whole hierarchies in design, and a theory of how design is the dynamic process of creating a representation for new objects and systems.
The design of a complex product such as a helicopter or a jet engine requires multilevel co-ordination, interaction and coordination among many different individuals and groups of designers who can be located at different geographical sites, and might even work for different companies. Design communication has been identified as a major determinant of success or failure in design processes. The second paper, by Maier, Eckert and Clarkson, proposes a conceptual meta-model of how communication in engineering design can be viewed. It reflects an information-centred view in connection with interactional and situational aspects. This model is envisioned to provide the backbone of an audit tool to assess the as-is as well as the desired communication situation in a company.
The third paper by Cumming and Akar, highlights some issues of collaborative design such as importance of flexibility in design teams, centralisation and decentralisation issues in information systems to support collaborative design, and diversity issues when establishing a design team. In this paper, one promising approach to team communication and coordination was proposed by using P2P (peer-to-peer) groupware technologies. These enables construction of online social groups in which specialized types of information can be exchanged. Peer-to-peer (P2P)-based groupware allows design team members to acquire relevant local perspectives from their collaborators in a distributed, non-prescriptive fashion.
The paper by Green provides a case study of exploring complexity in place-branding of the west London. A first view of branding suggests that the design process is complex, while the resulting artefact may be as simple as a new logo or livery. This paper shows that brands and branding can be highly complex, going much further than two-dimensional graphic devices. The general context of place-branding is explored in the context of a case study putting in place the foundations of a brand for West London. This illustrates the challenges of collaboration across a large geographic region with a diverse range of stakeholders.
The last paper by Garner, gives another case study, that of designing a distance learning course for design students. It discusses the problems of design education in general and the special problems of teaching design at a distance. It is suggested that distance learning could alleviate the problems experienced by many university design departments, as the numbers of students increases without a matching increase in resources. The process of designing, producing, marketing and delivering a particular distance learning course is described, where this involves collaborating teams of academics, editors, software engineers, graphic designers, and administrators. Here the problem is communicating to students an understanding of the many complexities in design using media such as text, graphics, movies, and the Internet, with limited face-to-face tuition. Creation of such courses involves intense collaboration between the team members, and the paper discusses the methods used in this case. It ends with a forward looking view of how new technologies may support collaborative design in the future, and how they may be used to teach students more about embracing complexity in design.
Through its many activities, our cluster has verified that design is indeed complex, and that the new science of complex systems can make a significant contribution to the theory and practice of design. In particular, as these papers from the workshop on Exploring Complexity in Collaborative Design illustrate, ideas from complexity science can be applied directly to collaborative design, while collaborative design is a very fruitful area of research in the science of complex systems.
Guest Editors
Dr Shengfeng Qin
School of Engineering and Design
Brunel University
Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH, UK
Professor Jeffrey Johnson
Department of Design and Innovation
The Open University
Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK