Bridging the gap between the individual and the group: the education of attention in design

ABSTRACT

The research question that we address in this paper is: how is individual design expertise learned so that it is sufficiently recognisable and intelligible to other designers so that small groups can coordinate their activity in joint work? We inform this question with an analysis of an episode between an expert product designer and a student within a formal design critique in an educational setting. Our analysis is guided by three key analytic commitments. The first treats the expert and student as actors in a joint task. The second takes attention as the task to which they are jointly committed. And the third uses Vygotsky’s learning principle that the joint activity of an individual with a more experienced other establishes a social relation between them available for future appropriation by the less experienced participant. Our analysis shows how the expert and student together (re)produce an instance of the expert’s attentional skill, making visible and audible an important means by which culturally shared practice can move between expert and student designers.

KEYWORDS:

• Joint attention
• design language
• design critique
• multi-modal analysis

Acknowledgments

We thank Natalie Jolly for instructive comments on an early draft, and are grateful for the comments of the anonymous reviewers on the original submission and all revisions. We also thank Robin Adams for making available to us the data sources analyzed here.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).