Virtual PlatformA Spatial Environment for Design Dialogue
Thomas Leerberg Phd, Associate Professor, Architect MAA
To experience Virtual Platform first hand go to http://virtualplatform.dskd.dk
KeywordsKnowledge exchange, team setting and team solving, distributed environments, shared terminology and integration of theory into best practice
ConcernThe project is concerned with three problems that face virtual teams today:
- 1) that the creative process is carried out through a diverse range of digital media, which are not or only poorly integrated
- 2) that the digital tools used by virtual teams are not designed for that specific purpose but used in a very pragmatic way, which often limits the creative efficiency and
- 3) that virtual teams need a shared terminology for the design process.
The challenge is therefore to integrate media, to develop dedicated design tools and to construct a shared terminology for communication across borders, time zones and cultures.
Operational and Constructive DesignIf we observe theories of design,(1) we may unfold two extreme views on what design is.
- In the first view design is the specific transformation of materials according to certain ideas or patterns in an artistic or industrial production, where each specific aspect of design has its own rules, traditions and technologies. This is a rather traditional view of design, often seen from the outside by the historian, the economist or the technologist.
- In the second view, design is seen as the dynamic interaction between all the aesthetic, technological, sociological, economic and political aspects that together construct our world – in the words of John Thackara, the aspects that are “beyond the object”.(2)
It is too easy just to see these views in a historical context, as an old view, defined by the technologies of industry and mass production, and as a new view, defined by the technologies of virtual teams and distributed networks. It would be more productive to see the former as an operational view and the latter as a constructive view on design.
We could say that in the first view, design aims to optimize the internal sequence of operations that together define the chain of processes, while in the second view, design aims to optimize the environment in which, the design activity takes place and the creative team do design.
The operational view may be an expression of a strict utilitarian connection with well-defined borders and the constructive view may be an expression of a dynamic flow between areas of great conceptual mobility. This is a distinction that also has been made by Donald Schön as he writes:
“From the perspective of Technical Rationality, professional practice is a process of problem solving ... But with this emphasis on problem solving, we ignore problem setting, the process by which we define the decision to be made, the ends to be achieved, the means which may be chosen.”(3)
Design SpaceThe professor at the Research Policy Institute, School of Economics and Management at Lund University, Rikard Stankiewicz, offers us two concepts that are directly related to the two views on design – namely that of evolutionary regimes of technology and the construction of design spaces.
Stankiewicz’ argument begins as a critique of how the evolutionary process of technology has been the succession of revolutionary paradigms, which did not have the ability to cumulate knowledge, techniques and information, but instead separated design into discrete design regimes that had very little exchange with other regimes, and therefore wasted valuable information and time.
Instead Stankiewicz offers us the concepts of design space and operands, where an operand can be the overall project and in itself be constructed from a very wide range of operands like individuals in a team, parameters, rules, strategies, materials and so forth. Instead of seeing the design task as a diffuse cloud of issues, Stankiewicz’ concept creates a clear structure, where the single operand can be described and given a voice.
Further, we could argue that the culture of space – the shared consensus of space that Stephen Kern(4) describes – may be seen as a criteria for the selection and structuring of the operands, more than an operand in itself. The culture determines which operands are relevant at a given time, to a given team of designers, which they may choose to follow or not. This could form the basis for shared collaborative design environments, as mediated workspaces and virtual teams.
Stankiewicz combines the operands with the environment or structure of the design space, making the structure of the space itself the actual design. In this way, the solution to a given design problem becomes a question of setting the best construction by selecting the right operands and combining them in the right way – in other words, to construct the right design space and the right team. In this approach, Stankiewicz is close to Donald Schön’s concept of problem setting and reflection-in-action. Schön writes:
“Problem setting is a process in which, interactively, we name the things to which we will attend and frame the context in which we will attend to them.”(5)
Team Setting and Team SolvingA critique can of cause be raised against such views – that they focus on well established teams and networks and therefore relate more to an old setting with a firm company structure than to a new setting with everchanging teams, a wide range of participants and diverse media.
If we keep Schön’s terminology in mind, we could argue that just as the design process can be seen as ’problem setting’ and ’problem solving’, so can the dialogue aspect of that same design process be seen as ’team setting’ and ’team solving’.
And just to repeat Schön’s suggestion, we should focus just as much on the ’setting’ as on the ’solving’ in this case – the initial ’team setting’ is just as important as the continued ’team solving’.
This distrinction is critical to the resarch project ‘Virtual Platform’. While Stankiewicz’ and Schön’s concepts are valid to the ‘traditional’ parts of what virtual team do, they are not sufficient when it comes to ‘team solving’ and even less when it comes to ‘team setting’. Here we suggest looking elsewhere in our digital culture and to study the culture of ’match-making’ in virtual communities – ‘browsers’ and ’seekers’.
1) As this chapter is concerned with the act of designing, the word ‘design’ is primarily understood as a verb and not as a stylistic label or stigmata of an object. It is neither used for a normative judgment of what makes good design and bad design, nor is ‘design’ limited to traditional industrial design.
2) John Thackara quoted in Mitchell, C. Thomas (1993), Redefining Designing, From Form to Experience, New York, NY: Van Nostrand Reinhold, p. 1.
3) Schön (1991 (1983)), op. cit., p. 39-40.
4) Kern, Stephen (1983), ”The Culture of Time and Space”, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
5) Schön (1991 (1983)), op. cit., p. 40.
© Thomas Leerberg, 2006
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