Collaborating to restrict: a conversation analytic perspective on collaboration in design

Abstract

This paper applies a conversation analytic perspective to illustrate how workshop participants collaboratively introduce design restrictions. Whilst many workshop activities are grounded in the (noble) ideology of democracy and equality that underlies the Scandinavian tradition of participatory design and participatory innovation, we demonstrate how such ideal(s) can be overridden in practice, because participants orient to a more general, interactional social order in which the preference for agreement and progressivity prevails. The paper will illustrate how collaboration, from the perspective of the participants in workshops, is thus not about ensuring that everyone contributes equally, but is rather focused on avoiding disagreement and maintaining progressivity within the activity engaged in. In turn, we argue that this orientation by the participants has a restricting effect on the possibility of exploring design alternatives in workshops that are otherwise, on ideological grounds, designed to accomplish exactly that.

Keywords:

• collaboration
• conversation analysis
• design activities

Notes

1. Our analysis is based on video-recordings of each of the events discussed. The video-recordings have then, in the tradition of CA, been transcribed according to Jefferson (2004). A list of conventions can be found at the end of this paper. Visual behaviour has not been transcribed, but will be included in our analysis when deemed relevant.

2. We are indebted to Elisabeth Heimdal and Tanja Rosenqvist for their permission to include this data material in our research.

3. It is noteworthy that in other naturalistic studies of collaborative (rather than participatory) design in a range of industrial settings, different general patterns of interaction have been observed. For example, Ball and Ormerod (2000) reported designers coming to collaborative design meetings with multiple design concepts, ‘armed’ with articulated rationale for and against each; they also noted the influential role of the manager in keeping design options open and delaying premature consensus within the group. In our data, however, very different stakes are held by the participants, and different general orientations are exhibited.