Upholding the Poetic in Design Collaboration

Design is a fundamentally collaborative activity. It commonly calls on a wide range of expertise and is arguably most effective when all contributions can be considered from an early and highly conceptual phase of the process. The sharing of information, particularly in a process that, at its best, involves collective conceptualisation is complicated by the very close and reciprocal relationship between the partial knowledge about the object of design and the mode of expression or representation of these ideas. As the design process and its numerous inputs, iterations and interrelationships become embedded in the communications; knowledge capture, management and access become central issues. This paper will selectively recount some of the substantive evidence for the characteristics of communication environments most supportive to design collaboration. In response to these findings it will introduce the use of wiki as the basis of an environment to provide this support, provide more detailed examples of the ways in which wiki has been adopted in early collaborative experiments and describe the developments currently being implemented, and how these are being tested in use.