Jeanette Landgrebe

Collaborating to restrict: a conversation analytic perspective on collaboration in design

This paper applies a conversation analytic perspective to illustrate how workshop participants collaboratively introduce design restrictions. Whilst many workshop activities are grounded in the (noble) ideology of democracy and equality that underlies the Scandinavian tradition of participatory design and participatory innovation, we demonstrate how such ideal(s) can be overridden in practice, because participants orient to a more general, interactional social order in which the preference for agreement and progressivity prevails. The paper will illustrate how collaboration, from the perspective of the participants in workshops, is thus not about ensuring that everyone contributes equally, but is rather focused on avoiding disagreement and maintaining progressivity within the activity engaged in. In turn, we argue that this orientation by the participants has a restricting effect on the possibility of exploring design alternatives in workshops that are otherwise, on ideological grounds, designed to accomplish exactly that.