Exploring how junior design professionals cope with and learn from value-based conflicts (original) (raw)
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Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design
Junior designers are not trained to cope with critical situations and conflict at work. Most design schools do not educate their design students to prepare them for (potential) conflict. As a result, junior designers often do not have conflict-handling skills to handle critical situations and conflicts. While some tools and methods exist to help them make responsible design choices, these often address value differences underlying (potential) conflict without taking the perspective of the designer, and thus without supporting young designers to start by reflecting on their own intrinsic values.The aim of this study is to find a way to help junior designers to reflect effectively on critical situations, thereby improving their conflict-handling skills. Data was collected through four steps in an action research. Researchers collaborated with an identity programme for junior design professionals. Insights from try-outs and small interventions were transferred into design requirements ...
In this paper we outline the theoretical framework and the view from practice as a foundation for our research approach. The use of values in practice was explored through semi-structured interviews with four design professionals and one design student. Additionally, an unstructured interview with Dr den Ouden was conducted to better understand the value framework (Ouden, 2012). Analysing the interviews made us realize that conflicts are not uncommon and can result in abandonment of the project or termination of the collaboration. At the end of the paper we propose two research questions and a research methodology.
Design thinking as a disruptive discourse. Embracing conflict as a creative factor.
The design discipline is nowadays extending its boundaries, becoming more than a profession, a way of thinking and a problem solving approach. This process implies bringing together multiple models of reasoning, modalities of practice and divergent perspectives. A large amount of literature has been dedicated to the adoption of design thinking in other disciplines [1] [2] [3], and to its successfully application in business practices [4]. However, less attention has been put on the contrasts and frictions provoked by the designerly system of thinking. Before understanding and accepting an approach specific to the design profession, as a valid and reliable working principle, the confrontation between the different actors in a multidisciplinary team has to pass through a conflictual phase [5] [6]. Taking into consideration a series of experiences that involve multidisciplinary teams, the next paper concentrates on the conflict as a powerful and essential step in the creative process. In this sense the conflict management will be presented in terms of understanding the root of the contrasts, proposing that rather than leveling the differences, through mitigation, the conflictual, moment has to be exploited as an important step in the working process[7]. The main question asked in the paper is: what if design could be used as a provoking factor, in order to create entropy and induce, more creative problem solving approaches? The paper will unfold in several parts: first the design thinking approach will be explained. The second part will stress out the increasing ethnic and disciplinary diversity of the workgroups and the benefits of the differences. In the third part the critical moments in the project management flow will be underlined. The discussion will show different methods to channel conflict towards a creative change in the reasoning system introducing design as a creative element. We will conclude by proposing a different way of looking at the design thinking, emphasizing its potential as a disruptive
Integrating Conflict into Early Design Education
2018
In contrast to traditional design studios, Community Design studios are opportunities to engage the contingencies that confront real-world design issues. These types of studios engage community/university partnership approaches with a range of community groups and non-profit organizations. Students and architectural curriculum benefit because they build the capacity within an architecture program to define problems with an interdisciplinary lens, encompassing a broad spectrum of design challenges. They rely on a beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity. These learning opportunities are essential for the beginning design student. Unfortunately, many Community Design opportunities are not available to all students and even then, rarely until late in a students’ design education.
Developing New Value in Design: Not "What" but "How"
This study examines how designers in professional practice are evolving the concept of " value " in designed products and systems. Contemporary culture's obsession with design, coupled with a knowledge-based economy and an over-saturated marketplace, requires designers to create and contextualize their work in unique ways if they are to stand out and attract consumers. To succeed, designers must shift their focus from creating mere artifact to developing highly complex narratives and design processes utilizing sophisticated research methods that, in turn, create new forms of perceived value. In addition, they must collaborate with other disciplines, understand interconnectivity of global systems, and adopt a "designer-as-social scientist" approach. This professional shift from "what to design" to "how to design" is radically altering design education. This study aims to provide design educators and program directors with an awareness of how they can improve their students' preparation for entry into professional practice. It also aims to provide designers with an awareness for how they may develop and strengthen their professional practice.
The concept of value in design practice–an interview study
servdes.org
Use and the value thereof are implicit in the design discourse and therefore rarely explicitly spoken of, although they are at the core of design practice. With the recent turn to a service dominant logic perspective, the service marketing discourse opens up for understanding value as value-in-use and value-in-context. This paper empirically explores and describes ways in which professional designers themselves express "value-in-use". The findings suggest that professional designers do not focus explicitly on value as a standalone concept, but conceptualize value-in-use through contextualization and an extensive use of emotions.
VULINDLELA, making new pathways DEFSA 17th Conference Proceedings, 2023
Collaboration is recognised as essential in the process of solving large-scale complex problems and can therefore be observed in both the design industry and in design education. As part of design collaboration, design teams go through a process of framing the design problem, proposing potential solutions, and taking the steps required to produce an outcome. Framing, as originally defined by Schön (1999), provides a method to identify the decisions that a design team takes on their journey to establish potential design solutions. Ideally, for a collaboration to be successful design teams need to arrive at a share frame characterised by a common understanding of the problem, solution, and actions. This article presents a phenomenological study of the decision-making strategies that undergraduate design students apply in framing concepts during an open-ended, short-term, intense, collaborative design project. Students from multiple campuses who were studying towards degree, diploma, in the first and second-year across a range of design disciplines participated in the project. Data was generated through interviews with a small number of students from different groups on two campuses. The data revealed that students described group decision making in terms of positive and negative emotional experiences as well as the source of stress, conflict, and negotiation. The negative experiences were primarily linked to conflict caused by a lack of trust, poor communication, and uneven workload. Although framing was not explicit, what students described was the struggle to generate and agree on a shared frame. Including collaborative projects in design education is essential to establishing new pathways for student learning. Based on an analysis of student interviews, we propose that certain adjustments to collaborative projects may enhance the learning experience and the design product that students generate. These adjustments include timing the project to accommodate novice design students, explicitly incorporating and addressing the framing process, and including training in soft skills such as team building, leadership, and conflict management.
Values and argumentation in collaborative design
CoDesign, 2020
We present analyses of interactions produced in meetings concerned with design of artefacts, where core values (i.e., fundamental beliefs of a person or a group) are at stake, focussing on the processes by which debates evolve and are (possibly) resolved during face-to-face elaboration of design solutions. Four groups of four participants were studied during their collaborative design of sustainable neighbourhood projects. We show that in this case, value conflicts are not genuinely resolved, in that participants do not concede with respect to their values within the duration of the meetings. Value conflicts involve renegotiating meanings of design proposals in order to examine their (in)compatibilities, and to determine possible compromises. Participants either try to 'dissolve' value conflicts by transforming them into conflicts on a factual plane, or else they abandon the discussion, maintaining adversarial positions, changing the topic of discussion, without reaching agreement. The study also highlights the importance of participants who spontaneously adopt moderator roles, supporting meaning-making on the plane of values or else shift the debate towards practical considerations. We discuss implications for both collaborative design and participatory design, considering the roles that values play in these processes.
in_bo ricerche e progetti per il territorio la città e l'architettura, 2020
Professional education programs in environmental design disciplines aim to create ready-to-work designers to introduce in the world of practice. Studio courses are the places where students learn how to perform the professional tasks of design. Education in the studios has a practice-oriented focus, and students usually engage forms of experiential learning, focusing on the performance of final products rather than reflecting on the process. Forms of reflection on the design process do not seem to be part of the tradition of such courses. Students are not taught to do that, so this is also why they find difficult to convey what is in their mind when they are designing. The purpose of this talk is to start a discussion about the type of education instructors offer in design studio courses. In the text, I presents a qualitative research process where I have observed a course class in the Master program of Landscape Architecture at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala. Students’ voices captured during the final workshop in this course show how they reflect on their design process and how they perceive their design experience.