DISTRIBUTING THE DESIGN(ER) ROLE IN WEB DESIGN TEAMS

In response to the growing complexity of design projects, for example in digital strategy situations, designers work increasingly in teams. In the context of collaborative design, this paper asks how design activities are shared among team members who drawn on various expertise. We report on a 24-hour work marathon in which 25 members of a design agency developed a Web design for a local nonprofit association. The team adopted a work process based on Agile programming ideals that was new to them. This organizational innovation caused some confusion. We highlight two points produced by this novelty, and time pressures. Firstly, participants discussed the process or how to go about things throughout the duration of activity; secondly, the idea generation process did not precede discussion of how to do things, but seemed to follow it. Although they were made in an exceptional situation, these two observations suggest a need to reconsider collaboration challenges in interdisciplinary design teams and to examine whether design models developed for individual designers adequately represent the collaborative design process.

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