Tools for building consensus on goals

Abstract

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.

A Notation to Support Exploring Collaboration in Design Teams

“…Expanding the design process to the team, designing can be seen as a distributed cognitive process, involving the designers, their materials and environments [39,40]. Thus also in this case, representations of various kinds support this distributed cognitive process working as "material anchors", influencing the process and allowing the team to evolve and to reach a final proposition [41][42][43].…”