Design Requirements to Educate and Facilitate Junior Design Professionals to Reflect more Effectively on Critical Situations and Conflicts at Work

Abstract

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 for an approach to educate and facilitate junior design professionals to reflect more effectively on critical situations.

Let's Take This Offline: A Thematic Analysis of Virtual Conflict in Hybrid Collaborative Design Teams

“…We identified three axial codes that comprise the project management theme (operations, time, and money), examples of which are included in Table 2. Conversations about the general operations of the project focused on what tasks had to be done, specifying details about file organization, software used, and task allocation, a pattern that also emerged in van Onselen et al (2019). Conflicts were often caused by a lack of initiative, confusion about the current version of a file, and disagreements about task prioritization and dependencies.…”

“…As such, conflict is a popular topic in design literature (e.g. Badke-Schaub et al (2007); van Onselen et al (2019); Paletz et al (2017)). The recent rise of virtual and hybrid work has resulted in a greater dependency on virtual communication platforms for design teams which may exacerbate conflict: teams rely on written communication, work asynchronously, and may be geographically dispersed (National Research Council, 2015).…”

“…Scholars typically divide conflict into three types: task-disagreements about the goal of the work, process-disagreements about how the goal is achieved, and relational-interpersonal incompatibilities among group members (Jehn, 1997). Task conflict may help teams share information, solve problems (Jehn, 1997), and develop new ideas (van Onselen et al, 2019), which are all beneficial in engineering design. In contrast, process and relational conflict tend to negatively influence performance (Jehn, 1997).…”