Editorial

This special issue of CoDesign presents a collection of studies of what happens through talk and gesture in design meetings. The work originated in an international research project 1 in which 27 research groups with interests in design thinking were invited to analyse a common set of data comprising video recordings of four design meetings. These naturally occurring meetings took place as parts of two very different design projects. Two of the meetings, recorded a few days apart, between specialists from mechanical, electronic and software design and ergonomics were concerned with teasing out possible solutions to issues associated with the design of a digital pen which would exploit a novel printing technology. The other pair of meetings, which took place several months apart, comprised discussions between a municipal architect and his clients to progress the design of a crematorium to the stage of detail needed for planning application.

As far as we know, the sharing, on this scale, of a common data set to further research into design thinking has only one precedent in the international design research community. This is the Delft protocols workshop held in 1994 and retrospectively referred to as DTRS2. The data supplied to researchers invited to participate in the Delft workshop comprised two video-taped recordings of a product design exercise conducted in laboratory conditions. The collection of protocol studies resulting from that initiative was published in 1996 as Analysing Design Activity. 2 Today it remains an important reference for design researchers as a landmark study of the potential and the limitations of what protocol studies of researcher-instigated design activity can tell us about design thinking.

In the years since Analysing Design Activity was published, design research has increased hugely in volume and has developed in many directions. Subsequent design-thinking research symposia on Descriptive Models of Design (1996), Design Representation (1999), Designing in Context (2001) and Expertise in Design (2003) have made their own contributions to the expansion and the maturing of the fields of design research. One important area of development over the last decade has been the increasing emphasis on studying issues and phenomena which are only manifested in authentic design activity as it is practiced ‘in the wild’. Here, credible analysis relies on studying design processes and outcomes which have not been initiated by the researcher and where researcher intervention is minimised.

In the spirit of these sorts of investigations, the DTRS7 data set comprised multiple angle video recordings, transcripts and facsimiles of documents, plans, drawings, sketches, notes and so on, brought into, or generated during, the four authentic design meetings selected for distribution to the design researchers participating in the DTRS7 project. 3 The durations of the meetings ranged between one and a half and two and a half hours, and the length of the transcripts were typically about 2000 lines. A rudimentary transcript notation was employed for the project data and this has been retained for the papers in this special issue; it is shown in Figure 1. 4 Some research demands an augmented notation (for example, the work of Glock in this special issue); in these cases, researchers were able to supplement the transcript data provided, using the video records of each meeting to support their particular needs.

Figure 1. Simplified transcription notation used in this issue of CoDesign.

The studies selected for this special issue have three features in common. First, each one brings to our attention aspects of collaboration which are only visible convincingly in data drawn from naturally occurring design activity. Second, each contribution has something to say about design collaboration and is therefore central to CoDesign's declared research scope. Third, these papers show the rich potential for advancing our understanding of design activity offered by fine-grained attention to verbal and gestural interactions among collaborators. (A much larger collection of studies based on the DTRS7 data set will be published in 2009. That work includes analyses of the material from a broad range of methodological standpoints including further grounded and data-driven approaches as well as several which are theory driven assessments of the data. 5) In this special issue, Matthews' paper focuses on the material from the two engineering design meetings, designated E1 and E2; the remaining contributions from Glock, Luck, McDonnell and Oak use material from the two architectural design meetings, designated A1 and A2. Anchoring of references to the meeting transcripts is provided in the form of meeting identifier and transcript line numbers, e.g. (A1, 234).

Glock's fine-grained analysis of episodes of gesture and talk shows exactly how design requirements are introduced by the designer as design progresses. He presents this phenomenon as an inherent mechanism supporting design progression. Through this, and an elucidation of the power of the vagueness invested in natural language, he draws attention to the fundamental difference between conceiving design as being goal-oriented rather than goal-directed. Viewing design as goal-oriented makes room for what we observe in practice, namely that interpretive flexibility is a critical necessity which at once supports both the social interaction of collaboration and the design progression it is intended to achieve.

Luck studies how properties of a design are produced verbally through design interactions. She pays attention to interactions relating to the design concept, distinguishing them from talk which enacts moves in the design space relating to other aspects of the design. She identifies an asymmetry in the relationship between architect and client towards design refinements which corresponds with this distinction. Specifically, she identifies a difference in the extent to which the design concept is negotiable in comparison with other design ideas and issues. She characterises the design concept as having agency and, through conceptualising it in this way, she is able to engage in discussion about the nature of the design concept itself based on the properties it exhibits in design conversations.

McDonnell's analysis is concerned with how architects and building users come to find their collaboration effective, and a mutually satisfying experience, in which their expectations about their own roles and positions are not challenged or compromised. Through a close analysis of their conversation she shows some of the ways in which they negotiate to the point of agreement over design decisions and over what are deemed to be adequate justifications of those decisions. Through a series of examples drawn from the data, she shows different strategies through which the participants appeal to each other's perspectives and thus collaborate subtly, supporting each other in moving the design on.

Oak's analysis unpacks those aspects of the interactions between architects and clients which shape their performance of these social roles. Her central concern is with how this performance impacts on the structure of their conversation and on what they say as they question and answer each other. Once the performance of roles is acknowledged as a task that interaction sustains, Oak shows us how we can understand better a fuller range of motives, conscious and unconscious, for how collaborators behave towards one another.

Finally, we turn to the work presented by Matthews. Who among us has ever participated in a brainstorming session (outside of a classroom setting) which strictly adhered to the rules of brainstorming, even though the rules are few and simple to express? Matthew's study investigates the relationships between the rules of brainstorming and the interactions that actually take place during two engineering design meetings, both of which are ostensibly organised as brainstorming sessions. By focusing his attention on how social order is produced in interaction he is able to show how brainstorming rules are modulated by social order and thus provides us with a way of accounting for the invoking and breaking of brainstorming rules through attending to how the local relevance of talk is maintained.

What we hope these papers show collectively is that attention to the fine detail of what actually takes place during every day design interactions not only has rich potential to advance our understanding of design collaboration but also provides us with evidence to challenge simplistic attitudes to a whole range of phenomena concerning design including, here, design goals, design requirements, the values and uses of design methods, notions about ownership of the design concept and other design ideas, the roles and relationships among contributing experts addressing design issues, and what is being achieved through the social interaction that takes place.

We would like to thank Stephen Scrivener for his long-standing interest in the goals of Design Thinking Research Symposium 7 and for providing us with this opportunity to present a selection of the work from the DTRS7 project to the CoDesign community.

Notes

1. Further information about DTRS7 is available from http://design.open.ac.uk/dtrs7 (accessed 8 October 2008).

2. Cross, N., Christiaans, H., and Dorst, K., 1996. Analysing Design Activity. Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons Ltd.

3. Lloyd, P., McDonnell, J., Reid, F., and Luck, R., 2007. DTRS7 data. These data are not currently publicly available for general distribution.

4. This simplified notation, selected for its clarity, is a sub-set of that published in Vine, B., Johnson, G., O'Brien, J., and Robertson, S., 2002. Wellington archive of New Zealand English transcribers' manual, available at: http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/research/lwp/docs/ops/op5.htm (accessed 8 October 2008).

5. McDonnell, J. and Lloyd, P. (eds.), forthcoming, 2009. About:Designing Analysing Design Meetings. London: Taylor and Francis Group.