Behaviours in design collaborations: Insights from a team learning perspective

This paper proposes that designers can improve their collaboration effectiveness by foster team learning behaviours. Most of the design collaboration literature is on how to effectively transmit information between members. Team learning literature, however, covers how to effectively transmit, understand, refine and retransmit information between members. Despite the extant literature on design collaboration, there has been little to no research that examines the model and effects of team learning behaviours on delivering collaborative designs. This paper provides a literature overview of design collaboration, which has predominantly studied design activities through a social lens. It then provides the growing body of team learning literature from organisational science, which focuses on the learning processes of teams collaborating on a project. The paper then synthesises both strands of research, before proposing that team learning behaviours are more explicit in indicating effective design collaborations than our existing research on communicating practices.

keywords: design collaboration; team learning; collaborative behaviours

• year: December 2019 – August 2020
• for: Design Research Society
• download: Article