Fleur Deken

Development of design collaboration skills

This paper aims to advance our conceptual understanding of design collaboration, a domain-specific subset of collaboration skills that emphasises knowledge-sharing and knowledge-integration processes. This paper explores how design collaboration skills develop along with design expertise across three stages of experience. First-year bachelor students, master students, and design professionals took part in a design game to investigate their design collaboration skills. We assessed their design collaboration skills by analysing their sessions for the degree and quality of knowledge sharing and integration using a reflective practice analysis and an interpretative analysis of their conversation. It was found that the first-year bachelor students and the professionals outperformed the master students in terms of collaborative design performance. In finding this nonlinear relationship, we highlight the need to distinguish between design expertise and design collaboration skills and to treat them as independent concepts when assessing design team performance. Finally, through an interpretive analysis, we developed a typology of design collaboration approaches at the three stages of experience.

Generating Novelty Through Interdependent Routines: A Process Model of Routine Work

We investigate how multiple actors accomplish interdependent routine performances directed at novel intended outcomes and how this affects routine dynamics over time. We report findings from a longitudinal ethnographic study in an automotive company where actors developed a new business model around information-based services. By analyzing episodes involving interdependent routines, we develop a process model of routine work and dynamics across routines. We identify three types of routine work (flexing, stretching, and inventing) that generate increasingly novel actions and outcomes. Flexed, stretched, and invented performances create emerging consequences for further actions across routines and surface differences between actors that could lead to breakdowns of routine work. Actors respond to such consequences through iterative and cascading episodes of routine work. We discuss how our findings provide new insights in efforts to create variable routine performances and the consequences of interdependence for routine dynamics.

Coordinating Through The Development Of A Shared Object: An Approach To Study Interorganizational Innovation

To advance theory on interorganizational product innovation, we propose an analytical model based on activity theory. Our model directs attention to the emergent micro-processes of interorganizational coordination. The main premise of our model is that contradictions between an organizations different activity systems create disturbances, which require practitioners to (partly) align work practices and (partly) integrate their different perceptions of the design object. These integration efforts may lead to work practice innovation and an expanded view of the object of product innovation. The contribution of our model lies in its practice perspective and its focus on the development of the object of innovation.

Relations Between Design Activities and Interactional Characteristics in Novice-Expert Design Consultations: ‘What’ is Done ‘How’

This study investigated processes in novice–expert consultation meetings in an organizational context to identify ‘what’ is done ‘how’ by novices and expert in consultation discourses. A conceptual model was developed for studying novice–expert design discourses at a fine-resolution level. An empirical study was performed at Rolls-Royce Aerospace Engineering. In total 7 audio-records were captured of meetings between trainees (novices) and expert designers, which occurred over the course of 3 trainee teams’ design projects. Relations were investigated between two coding schemes, namely the activity coding scheme and the conversational flow coding scheme. It was found that certain activities in the meeting were more often performed by either novices or experts, whereas other activities were more often performed collaboratively. Based on the results, implications for design engineering practitioners were derived and suggestions for further research are provided.Copyright