Investigating collaboration in interdisciplinary design teams

I investigated how designers and stakeholders interact during interdisciplinary collaborative design activity through conducting interview research with expert designers and ethnographic case studies at three design companies. Since people have different values and worldviews, the issues that commonly concern collaborative design are not self-evident but controversial. Consequently, collaborative design activity should be modelled as an argumentative process rather than a formal problem solving process. The insights from the research refine the argumentative model of design by revealing the influence of informal interactions in supporting collaborative design teams to bring aspects of context to bear upon their reasoning.