Socio-constructivist account of collaboration in concept design

In a collective design situation, participants usually have limited understanding of how other designers operate in the project and how their work has interdependencies with other design tasks. Most commonly, misunderstandings between team members will emerge around vague design representations and undocumented decisions, creating negative iterations in design. Collaboration at concept design includes actions to build shared understanding of product and process concepts amongst the design team. In this paper, it is suggested that the wicked nature of concept design requires collaboration to be conceptualised in terms of collective creative actions within team interactions. Through a synthesis of the literature, a model to study collaboration in concept design is suggested. The model proposes that collaboration is determined by the group's ability to perform collective-reflective actions. Further development on the proposed model will provide ways of measuring and improving collaboration within multidisciplinary design teams.