Enduring Designs, Transient Designers: A Comparison of the Workspaces and Materials of Professionals and Novices

This article reports results of a comparative analysis of expert and novice designers’ collaborative practice, focusing on differences in their workspaces and work materials. We conceptualize workspaces and materials as boundary objects and use the dimensions of infrastructure taxonomized by Star and Ruhleder (1996) as a framework for our analysis. As a result of the differences we observed, we suggest pedagogical implementations that may help novice designers learn to collaborate as experts do, and we identify further avenues for research and study.