In this section, I will present previous academic literature about design teamwork. This includes information and knowledge sharing, collective creativity, solution generation and sources for conflicts in design teams.
2.2.1 Design as a social process
There are some crucial differences between the work of a design team as opposed to the work of an individual designer. Valkenburg and Dorst (1998) noted that in a design team, the members support each other in answering questions that arise and by building upon each other’s thoughts and ideas. A team working like this would thus have an advantage over individual designers. However, the authors also noted that in the collaboration between several designers there are also several new difficulties. These difficulties lie primarily in synchronising the thoughts and activities of the team members, so that misunderstandings and uncoordinated actions are avoided.
Stempfle and Badke-Schaub (2002) found that in contrast to individual designers, design teams can not only focus on the design task itself, but must also focus on structuring and organising the teamwork. The authors distinguish between two main focuses of action, that they label content and process. The main steps under the content focused actions are goal clarification, solution generation, analysis of proposed solutions, evaluation of the solutions and decision for or against a solution idea. For the actions focused on the process, the authors defined five steps: planning of the work, analysis of the group process, evaluation of the group process, decisions concerning the process and control of group members’ work. The two focuses of action thus share similar elements.
Stempfle and Badke-Schaub (2002) stated that the design process in teams happens through a constant interweaving of sequences focused on the content of the design task and sequences focused on the group process.
Valkenburg and Dorst (1998), described the design process for teams as being based on four activities: naming, framing, moving and reflecting. Naming is when a design team explicitly looks for relevant objects in the design task. Framing is when the team frames a (sub)problem or a partial solution for further exploration. The frame then becomes the context, or scope, for further activities in the design process. Moving happens when
experimental actions happen within a frame. This can for example be generating ideas, sorting information, or combining and comparing ideas and concepts. Finally, reflection happens when practitioners reflect upon earlier activities in order to know what to do next. This is a crucial part of the design work because it allows the team to reflect on their behaviour and progress, in order to start new activities.
2.2.2 Shared understanding & knowledge sharing
It is common in design that the problem given is not as clear and apparent as in many other problem solving contexts (Cross and Cross, 1995). Instead, the problems are often ill-defined and ambiguous. Therefore, a big portion of the designers’ work is related to exploring and understanding the problem being solved. While an individual designer can form his own understanding of a problem, a team must reach a shared understanding of the problem they are trying to solve.
There are different ways for a design team to explore the problem they are working on.
Cross and Cross (1995) described listing the external requirements for the solution and discussing them as a way for the team to create a shared understanding. Another way is by trying to frame the problem. The aim of framing is to create an internalized conceptualization of the problem. For example, one designer can make a drawing of how he understands the problem, which then can be discussed in the team.
General communication can also be a struggle in design teamwork. Cross and Cross (1995) found that there easily can be misconceptions of concepts that the team members thought they understood the same way. For example, team members relying on personal knowledge, like previous experience, instead of public and formalized knowledge sources, can lead to misunderstandings (Cross and Cross, 1995). Also concepts that the team members thought that they shared can later turn out to have been misunderstood.
Therefore, a shared understanding can never be assumed in collaborative design work.
Both for understanding the problem, as well as for ideating and validating potential solutions, a crucial part of a design team’s work is finding and sharing relevant information (Poltrock et al., 2003). Organising this collaborative information retrieval so that all members of the team take part of the information gathered, is vital for the team’s success. In order to get this information, there is often a need to contact people outside of the design team. In their study, Poltrock et al. (2003) found that designers often prefer communicating with external stakeholders in person, instead of sending emails or messages. Personal communication helps building relationships with people,
which enables the designers to also interpret the emotional parts of the information, in addition to the factual parts.
2.2.3 Collective creativity
Creativity is often regarded as an important aspect of design, that can be found in every design project (Dorst and Cross, 2001). However, creativity does not only happen inside the mind of an individual. Hargadon and Bechky (2006) refers to creativity that arises due to the social interactions between people as collective creativity. When people interact with one another, they can rely on different experiences, knowledge, and perspectives to analyse a problem in different ways and come up with new solutions. The social interactions thereby trigger new interpretations and discoveries that an individual would not have achieved on his own. These interactions can happen in formal ways, such as brainstorming sessions, mut more often happen in an ad hoc fashion, like hallway discussions.
Hargadon and Bechky (2006) found four sets of activities that play a role in triggering moments of collective creativity. These are help seeking, help giving, reflective reframing, and reinforcing. Help seeking happens when a person asks for assistance to a challenging problem. While involving other people in the work, the person thereby gains different perspectives and knowledge to solve the challenge. Help giving represents the willing devotion of one’s time to help others with their challenges. This is necessary for help seeking to result in collaboration between people. Reflective reframing is when people through social interaction make sense of what they already know. For example, involving others can lead to them not only considering the question at hand, but also pondering on whether there is a better question to ask in the first place.
The fourth set of activities identified by Hargadon and Bechky (2006) is related to reinforcing activities that support individuals as they engage in help seeking, help giving, and reflective reframing. Actions that trigger collective creativity can often be constrained or undermined in organizations, thereby inhibiting problem solvers from tapping into each other’s experiences and knowledge. Reinforcing actions are therefore critical for enabling those moments when collective creativity emerges. For example, help seeking might be hindered by the idea that it signals ignorance or incompetence (Ashford, Blatt and VandeWalle, 2003). Therefore, a culture that encourages that kind of social interaction helps enable moments of collective creativity. According to Hargadon and Bechky (2006), hierarchical organizations can inhibit help seeking for the
same reason. Help giving can be hindered when managers and experts consider themselves too busy to have time for others’ challenges, leading to help being sought from people with more time at hand but who often might be less experienced and knowledgeable. For organizations that want to facilitate collective creativity, it is therefore essential to encourage social interactions that result in help seeking, help giving and reflective reframing.
According to Elsbach and Flynn (2013), creative workers tend to be more open to idea-giving behaviour than idea-taking behaviour. In their study, they found that incorporating other’s ideas into their work threatened the personal identities of the designers. Therefore, the authors suggested to emphasize idea-taking behaviour in organizations, especially incorporating others’ ideas, in order to promote creative collaboration.
2.2.4 Generating solutions
Stempfle and Badke-Schaub (2002) described two main processes in which design teams approach potential solutions. In the first process, a solution is quickly either accepted or discarded. This saves time and cognitive effort, but risks discarding ideas that would have been good after further analysis. In the second process, solutions are analysed thoroughly before they are accepted or rejected. This approach takes more time and effort but yields better results, especially in complex design problems. The authors argued that design teams naturally tend to employ the first process but might transition to the second process given certain conditions.
One of these conditions is lack of common understanding. In heterogenous groups, the members have different levels of understanding, and a proposed solution will not be understood by everyone right away. This leads to questioning the solution, which forces the team to further analyse the solution before it is accepted. Stempfle and Badke-Schaub (2002) argued that this mechanism could be one reason why heterogenous teams tend to outperform homogenous teams in complex problem-solving tasks.
2.2.5 Conflicts
Since team members might have different opinions both on what the problem is, as well as how to solve it, there will naturally be conflicts within a design team. Therefore, identifying, avoiding, and resolving conflicts is an inevitable part of design teamwork (Cross and Cross, 1995). Disagreement can, however, also provoke analysis of the design
problem or a proposed solution, as the team members try to find arguments to back up their standpoint (Stempfle and Badke-Schaub, 2002). This analysis, in turn, can lead to an improved outcome of the design work.
Emotional factors can also be a source for conflicts. Elsbach and Flynn (2013) found that while designers tend to be willing to offer ideas to others, they are often not as open to incorporating other’s ideas into their own work. Instead, this can make them feel that their personal identities are threatened, which in turn might lead to the designers resisting to engage in creative collaboration. Cross and Cross (1995) stated that when ideating a solution, it is common for designers to become very committed to a particular concept, sometimes even emotionally attached to the concept. This can lead to the designers feeling a need to persuade the other team members into accepting the concept.