Investigating the Significance of Informal Interactions within Interdisciplinary Design Activity

Designing is an activity that integrates knowledge from many different domains to create something new or to solve a problem. However, the innovative power that interdisciplinary approaches bring adds an additional layer of complexity. Additional factors come into play when stakeholders with specialist skills and diverse worldviews must create shared understanding to meet high-level goals. The paper presents results from an empirical study of interdisciplinary collaborative design activity in industry. Ethnographic case studies of three companies were conducted and twenty-seven (n=27) semi-structured interviews were recorded. The study used the DRM approach (Blessing and Chakrabarti, 2009) and using NVivo CAQDAS software supported theory construction. I identified twenty influencing factors and illustrated their dynamic interaction within a model of the collaborative design process. The study found that the innovative power of interdisciplinary collaborative design is underpinned by informal interactions. Consequently, I argue that developing design methods should take into account the significant role that informal interactions play within interdisciplinary collaborative design activity.