Collaborative negotiation in design: A study of design conversations between architect and building users

This paper examines some of the features revealed from analysis of the conversational exchanges taking place during two meetings between architects and their building-user clients at an early stage in a building design project. It reveals blurred boundaries between architects' and building users' argumentation positions and the potential of these as conversational moves. As we might expect, we see conversational turns in which each contributes from their own territory of expertise and we see them respond to each others' conversational invitations to supply information. However, we also see tentative excursions, where one party invokes the position or knowledge of the other to propose or justify a design decision, provoking, in turn, an expert response. Incidents such as these, revealed as conversational exchanges, show us how design progression is negotiated collaboratively. They provide us with a way of grasping concretely some of the subtleties of how shared ownership of a design is established within a non-participatory design setting.

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