Design Integrations

Design Integrations

Sharon Poggenpohl, Keiichi Sato, Sharon Poggenpohl, Keiichi Sato

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781841503448
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Design Allgemein

DESIGN
COLLABORATION

7

PRACTICING COLLABORATIVE ACTION IN DESIGN

Sharon Helmer Poggenpohl

Occurring more frequently and with greater diversity among participants, collaboration is an activity without substantial general theory (John-Steiner et al., 1998). No doubt participants reflect on their past collaborative experiences and try to improve current situations, but they lack a framework within which to locate problems and possibilities. Disciplines such as business, science, and education have done extensive research and reflection on collaboration from management (Brown and Druid, 1991; Argyrus and Schön, 1978) and learning perspectives (Lave and Wenger, 1991), but with no resulting general theory. Compounding this lack of structure is recognition that innovation is often the result of collaborative work, so the development of more reliable ways to think about and foster collaboration becomes a priority in many situations.

Business and social science have different viewpoints on collaborative action; business, in large part, attends to product and procedure, as well as to performance and output, while social science focuses on individual and group insight that lead to social process. These are complementary perspectives. Interestingly, learning may provide the collaborative bridge between business and social science approaches as it explores the importance of its social dimension—its relationship to cognitive and behavioral change—while it simultaneously demonstrates outcome-based performance in terms of achieving learning objectives. Design is similar in that it is tied to a performance that is often the outcome of interdisciplinary creative and social process. Along these same lines, others have observed that high performance teams are high performance learners (Leifer, 1996) and that learning is the only competitive advantage (Senge, 2006). Design has no particular collaborative process—collaboration is ad hoc. This lack of understanding and structure is detrimental to design collaboration. The following discussion seeks a remedy.

Knowledge and action in the world are most often social constructions among people with different values, agendas, institutional support, disciplines, interaction styles, social sensitivity, humor, timeliness—virtually all aspects of being human underpin this work we call collaboration. It takes many forms: inter- or multidisciplinary, inter-institutional, cross-cultural; it coalesces around stable teams and those that are assembled more fluidly; it involves working with people known or unknown to participants; the work may be on-site or remote or some combination of both; work may happen live or be highly mediated by technology. The variables that define a collaborative action are extensive and often change from one context to the next.

Here, the focus is on design action in collaborative settings. Designers do collaborate, but for the most part, exploration and understanding of its underlying issues remain unexplored. Individuals are increasingly aware of the limitations to their knowledge and skill in a complex technological and increasingly interactive world. Disciplines that structure knowledge and maintain boundaries are seeking interdisciplinary perspectives in the search for new knowledge and solutions to persistent problems. These well-defined disciplines are exploring their edges, looking for new perspectives beyond their boundaries, and seeking out complementary partnerships with individuals from other disciplines. With their established knowledge base, they look for more fluid and productive relationships. In contrast, design lacks a well-defined knowledge base and drifts opportunistically among other disciplines. This is the core problem for design in relation to collaborative action. Design is unsure of what knowledge it has to offer, how to position itself relative to others, and how to present and argue its position.

The difference between interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary is worth noting. Interdisciplinary refers to activities that fall between two disciplines. Multidisciplinary refers to activities in which several disciplines share perspectives (Rogers, 1994, 404). In addition, collaboration may involve inter-institutional work, which joins strengths not found in a single organization, and international work with its border-crossing cultural complexity. These are some of the factors that stimulate interest in collaboration in contemporary society; they range from interpersonal to interdisciplinary to multidisciplinary to inter-institutional to international.

The perspectives developed in this chapter are reflective and only somewhat theoretical. Design collaboration has only a small, recorded history. The current investigation brings us to a definition of collaboration, while knowledge management, decision-making, and presence reveal the importance of communication. Interdisciplinary collaboration reveals the inherent problems in such settings with particular attention to design. The problem of formalizing or theorizing about the practice of collaboration is discussed, along with a suggested practical way forward that trades on experiential perspectives and tentatively identifies variables found in collaborative work. The chapter ends with the introduction to the following chapters that encompass case studies and fieldwork.

Learning about Collaboration: the Early Years in Design

Collaboration has an interesting, if largely unwritten, history in design. It is not a new idea at all. Even in design sources discussing the history of large design offices (the Henry Dreyfuss office, for example [Poggenpohl, 2007]), conscious collaborative association of various kinds dates to the 1930s. Other associations are discussed in Group Practice in Design, a mid-twentieth-century book that explores collaborative variations in design practice in the United States and Britain (Middleton, 1967). The book focuses on a simple approach: people within one professional umbrella—doctors, lawyers, designers, etc.—work together for efficiency and scale to achieve an increase in service to the client and to enhance creativity and quality. Case studies of architecture, interior design, product design, communication design, and entertainment (broadcasting) complement the general discussion. Well-known architectural firms, for example, Skidmore Owings and Merrill in Chicago and The Architects Collaborative in Boston, as well as the Industrial Design Partnership (later called the Design Research Unit in Britain), ground the discussion in a practical way.

Group practice was an ideal some aimed toward, as expressed in the following statement (Middleton, 1967, 91):

…the idea [is] of [a] group team, composed of talents that are inevitably various and unequal, but which are given the fullest opportunity at every stage to make to the project as a whole such contribution as they may be capable of. In the fullest sense—not easily achieved—the essential purpose of group practice is to link and focus the creative and critical faculties of every member of the team, not just upon one or two facets of the problem but upon every aspect at every stage.

This is directly counter to the romantic notion of the secluded genius whose suffering, determination, and superior creativity bring about excellence. Given the complexity of contemporary life, one can be a “genius” in only a small way, i.e., time is too short to process and master all the knowledge and skill one might want to bring to bear on a project. Consequently, if one aspires to do large or complex work, collaboration provides the only reasonable context for development.

The ideal as expressed in Group Practice is seldom realized even today, as many perspectives and expert knowledge from different disciplines are needed on complex problems. Interaction among experts and the synthesis of perspectives can be problematic itself. Design has an additional problem in this context, also described by Middleton (1967, 63), as he explores what design is and what design can contribute. It resonates even more today than it did then [emphasis added]:

It is the perpetual frustration of the designer, be he landscape architect or typographer or product designer, that he is called in too late, when all major decisions have been taken and the project has already assumed such a form that little can be done to it save clean up some of its superficial ugliness. This is not design. The elegant design solution is that which meets maximum requirements with the minimum means. This postulates that all relevant factors must be embraced by the creative act of synthesis which we call design.

Today, design repositions itself at both ends of, as well as throughout, the design process spectrum. Well-known as a finisher of work to resolve aesthetic issues and smooth the way through production, design also provides analytical perspectives on what constitutes the problem to be solved at the earliest stage, and also engages intermediate steps toward its solution. The integration of design into a multidisciplinary action allows it to make its most complete contribution to problem, process, and solution, but this integration can be difficult.

In a section titled, “Patterns of Collaboration,” in Middleton’s book, two primary patterns are identified by their preposition: working for and working with. In the former, a director tightly controls and designs a project, drawing in others as consultants and workers as needed. In the latter, a group of people share knowledge, work together responsibly, and together make critical decisions facilitated by a leader. Transforming this idealistic vision of the possibilities of collaboration into reality is not easily achieved.

Defining the Collaborative Activity

Collaboration is poorly defined in the literature in which it appears; this is not surprising given its multiple domains of exploration and the particularities of its execution. Fourteen individuals offered definitions of collaboration based on their experience in design, two of them working “collaboratively.” Table 7.1 (Poggenpohl, 2004) shows the thirteen definitions.¹ Analysis of these definitions reveals the following characteristics: “who” participates in collaborative work includes design professionals, individuals with different capabilities, and other stakeholders; “what” they are doing is quite diverse—negotiating the scope and constraints of their work, sharing knowledge and expertise, combining and negotiating disjointed knowledge, performing productive activities, working together, developing their own knowledge, and working in their own best interests as well as allowing actionable entry to others; “why” they are doing this is also diverse—maximizing positive results of their activity, achieving common aesthetic, business, and social goals, solving problems, achieving success, producing something not otherwise possible, and making a better world; “how” they are doing this is also diverse—they mediate, argue, participate, act, react, and value in ways that are supportive, selfless, different but complementary, respectful, cooperative, self-satisfied, symbiotic, and most importantly, in a spirit of trust.

Table 7.1
Collaboration definitions

Dietmar Winkler: A supportive, to an extent selfless process, sharing one’s expertise and conceptual, interpersonal planning or implementation skills for maximizing the positive result of an activity.		Gosta Knudson: Develop your own knowledge by solving a problem together with other professions in a way that makes the world a better place in which to live.
Arlene Gould: The coming together of designers from various disciplines along with other professionals to share knowledge and achieve common aesthetic, business and social goals.		Jill Dacey: Two or more people working together on a project or problem. Best case scenario: when each individual is working in his/her own best interests, that interest contributes to the greater good (solution) to the project or problem. Each participant is self-satisfied.
Chris Barlow: Adjustment and combination of disjoint knowledge by diverse individuals.		Ruth Lozner: An interactive, cooperative conversation among members who can both contribute and benefit by the outcome and final action.
Alain Rochon: To put in common, actors whose expertise, knowledge, way of working, personality, etc. are different, but complementary. This action is meant to: solve a particular problem or task, or build or disseminate knowledge within a specific time frame.		Sharon Poggenpohl: Collaboration is based on a recognition of individual limitation along with the ability to trust others and allow them actionable entry into a situation.
Dirk Knemeyer: Multiple systems with complementary skills and interests engaged in active, respectful, productive activities to achieve more success.		Jay Rutherford: A group of people with different capabilities that perceive a task or problem to be solved and use their expertise in a symbiotic way to solve it. At the end — ideally — everyone has learned something new — either directly practical or social that they can use in future problem-solving situations.
Keith Russell: Collaborate = work together Elaborate = work it out Cooperate = do the work together Collaboration is that form of working together where the working together (is the work); it produces an understanding of an outcome (and the outcome) that could not otherwise be produced.		Roger Remington & Judith Gregory Collaboration involves negotiating scope, mediating, arguing, participating, interacting, acting, reacting and va...