EMERGENT ARTEFACTS AND COLLABORATIVE DESIGN NETWORKS: GENESIS AND DYNAMICS

This contribution opens the way towards the empirical investigation of what we call “design networks”, i.e. social networks aimed at the collaborative design of an artefact. In the explorative case proposed here the artefact is a set of standard specifications, the "Web services Architecture", designed by a wide network of organizations within the W3C consortium. Our hypothesis is that the artefact’s characteristics, seen as the final outcome of a collaborative design process, influence and drive the genesis and the structure of the social network that is designing it. This view is innovating the traditional perspective of social network analysis literature, that considers the network structure as exogenous and stable. We investigate the reciprocal influence between the artefact and the social network structure, with a phase in which the desired artefact may shape the network genesis and a phase in which the emergent network’s structure may drive the artefact design.