This special issue brings together recent research on collaboration in design situations, with a focus on analysing and evaluating the ‘quality of collaboration’ in these situations.
Although there is no consensus on a definition of collaboration, most researchers would agree that it involves sharing of goals, resources and representations relating to the joint activity of participants. Other important aspects relate to mutual respect, trust, responsibilities and accountability, within situational rules and norms. Moreover, the very notion of collaboration seems to presuppose a certain degree of equality between participants in terms of right to contribute (notwithstanding a more or less hierarchical situation) in the context of a socio-institutional mode of organisation that favours co-elaboration of ideas, knowledge objects or tangible artefacts.
In task-oriented collective activities such as design, the question of the interplay between collaboration processes, task processes and their (various) outcomes is central, not least in order to try to understand what ways of working together favour most effective designs. This is a question that concerns the broad range of social actors involved in and concerned by design activity, across different professional and educational situations.
The integrative concept of ‘quality of collaboration’ has been proposed recently as a means for addressing this question. The term ‘quality’ here can be understood from different points of view: in descriptive terms (identifying and discriminating the intrinsic properties of collaboration), in a normative sense (identifying what makes ‘good’ or less good collaboration, considered sui generis as well as in relation to its outcomes), or a combination of both. Different perspectives on the collaborative process and experience can be considered and compared, from first-person perspectives (of collaboration participants, of their institutions, companies) to third-party analyses of the complex processes and outcomes associated with collaborative design activity.
This special issue on the quality of collaboration in design situations comprises four contributions that represent various disciplinary approaches and research domains, in cognitive ergonomics and psychology (Détienne, Baker and Burkhardt), conversational analysis and ethnomethodology (Heinemann, Landgrebe and Matthews), discourse/dialogue analysis (Karlgren) and design methodology (Feast).
Heinemann, Landgrebe and Matthews adopt a first-person (participants’) perspective based on analysis of interaction in a context of participatory design. Their ethno-methodological and conversational analysis approach proposes a formal means for recovering the participants’ own perspectives on the events they act upon. This theoretical framework assumes that every (dialogic) social action is (by essence) collaborative and led by a pragmatic principle of preference for agreement and progressivity. This leads them to call into question both the idea (or ideology) of equality in a purportedly democratic process of participatory design, and the methodological aim of identifying and qualifying collaborative activity. According to the authors’ approach, collaboration is made manifest by participants’ moment-to-moment actions within the design settings.
Feast’s contribution also adopts a first-person perspective, whilst using a different methodological approach. On the basis of interviews of professional designers, this paper explores their perspectives on the significance of collaboration in their work. The study builds on research on social processes in design activity in order to contribute to clarifying the notion of quality of collaboration. The results provide insights into what professionals value as collaboration, in relation to an epistemic dimension (perspectives, disciplinary knowledge) in design; the social context (roles, responsibilities); inter-comprehension (communication, constructing understanding); and design and creative processes (free flow of ideas). This suggests that quality in collaboration is not just about efficient inter-personal communication and integration of ideas. The practice of collaborative design work, considered as a conversation, should make a contribution beyond the task at hand.
Karlgren addresses the question of how to support collaboration in design teams. In this paper, the quality of collaboration is seen as the capability of a design team and its members to recognise, avoid and deal with possible misunderstandings between designers. Using a conversational analysis approach, this research focuses on the ways in which misunderstandings and communication breakdowns are resolved, and the potential supporting roles played by design patterns. The analyses illustrate the various roles design patterns may have in collaborative problem framing — providing a structured format of relating problems to solutions — and show that the process of grounding is necessary for design patterns to become common useful resources for the teams. Whilst the existence of a design pattern vocabulary may be an indicator of quality, reflecting common ground, Karlgren discusses the value of misunderstandings as opportunities for clarification of ideas and learning in educational settings, again, stressing outcomes beyond the task at hand.
Finally, Détienne, Baker and Burkhardt explore the analyst’s (researcher’s) perspective(s) on the concept of quality of collaboration. As an empirical foundation of this concept, they provide arguments on relationships between effective collaboration and successful design, based on analyses of collaborative design activity. The paper explores and exemplifies methodological issues in assessing collaboration, providing a critical appraisal of methods for analysing quality of collaboration in design. The discussion highlights the importance of the social structure in which quality of collaboration is examined (e.g. power, collaboration cultures) as well as the various temporal scales along which it can be analysed. A link can be made here with the paper by Feast that considers the examination of collaboration beyond the task at hand. The need for extending the researcher’s perspective is discussed, both in terms of the additional dimension of the dynamics of interpersonal relations, and the necessity to articulate multiple views on the quality of collaboration. The qualities of collaboration to which precedence will be given depend on the objects of codesign activities, what is at stake, and the alternative viewpoints of social actors involved, including researchers.
Acknowledgements
This special issue builds on and extends a previous initiative of the guest editors, who organised a workshop at COOP 2010 (www.coopsys.org) on “quality of collaboration in task-oriented computer-mediated interactions” (Workshop Proceedings: http://www.iisi.de/102.0.html).