Designers collaborate with other experts during their projects in order to combine efforts towards greater solutions by creating bridges between disciplinary knowledge. Hence, design teaching establishments introduced team projects in their curriculum. Still, notable gaps persist between the intention and the implantation of assessment activities, which risks reducing the pedagogical value of the learning outcomes. By questioning the assessment of the object emerging from a collaborative design activity, the paper proposes a coherently aligned assessment strategy. Sociocultural assessment perspectives are used as a framework to view learning as a dynamic process mediated through social interactions, contradictions and culminating in knowledge externalisation. This paper offers a structure for an assessment strategy to enhance the practice and learning of collaboration through the development of the reflective skills of design students. The strategy links three main aspects of collaborative design -knowledge creation and integration, communication, and shared understanding-to sociocultural concepts to allow a discussion space for the re-socialisation of collaborative assessment.
This paper's aim is to discuss the impact of a set of tools specifically developed to facilitate goal alignment in multidisciplinary teams. The tools assist team members in building consensus on goals and defining priorities of complex design projects. The paper explains how the tools are operationalized within an engaging and intensive activity-a workshop context-and discusses the effects of both, the tools and the workshop, on real design situations and on the learning of future designers. The success of the workshop translates a valuable approach to the emergence of essential skills such as sensemaking, reasoning, negotiation and knowledge co-construction. The workshop activities highlight assets to generate common language and frame decision-making processes to address complex design situations. The activity flow allows for the gradual alignment of priorities and collective sensemaking leading to shared understanding of a systemic project vision. Reflecting on our observations and past implementations, this paper explicitly offers the theoretical arguments supporting our work and presents the pedagogical implementations of the tools in the context of a workshop in order to bridge from the learner's experiences to the learning outcome specific to collaborative design.
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