Professional perspectives on collaborative design work

Abstract

Collaboration has become more important owing to the challenges designers face to compete in fast-paced global markets. Designers need to capitalise on the strengths of different stakeholders to develop shared knowledge and practices to better deal with the complexity of problems facing society today. This study builds on research concerning social processes in design activity through exploring professional designers' perspectives on the significance of collaboration in their work. Twenty-three semi-structured in-context interviews were conducted with professional designers from 13 different professional specialisations. The interview data were analysed using a grounded theory interpretive approach. The insights developed from the analysis suggest that the development of support for collaborative design should target not only methods of solving design problems, but also informal and social interactions that bring together different stakeholders while respecting their differences. Further research in this area would enhance the effectiveness of collaboration and increase designers' ability to participate in the early stages of product development for complex problems.

Keywords:

• design collaboration
• design activity
• teamwork

Acknowledgements

The author would like to gratefully acknowledge the interview respondents for generously giving their time to participate in this study. Further, the author would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on earlier versions of this article. This study has been supported by Swinburne University of Technology.

Notes

1. Expertise was interpreted in two ways, first according to the duration in years of the respondents' professional experience, and second through interpretation of the respondents' responses with a model of design expertise adapted by Kees Dorst (2008). According to this model there are six levels of expertise – naïve, novice, advanced beginner, competent, expert, master and visionary – which correspond with six ways of interpreting and solving problems. According to Dorst (2008), ‘Competent designers … select the elements in a situation that are relevant, and choose a plan to achieve the goals. Problem solving at this level involves the seeking of opportunities, and of building up expectations … . The real expert has many years of experience which allows them to recognise high-level patterns in design situations and respond to a specific situation intuitively, and performing the appropriate action, straightaway’ (p. 9).