Luck, R (2015) Organising design in the wild: Locating multidisciplinarity as a way of working. Architectural Engineering and Design Management, 11(2), pp. 149-162. ISSN 1745-2007
Abstract
The workplace ecology of a multidisciplinary design team is studied to better understand how design work is organised in the wild. Reported is an ethnographic account of the events and practices that were seen, in patterned and subtle ways, to organise the design work for a project. Design events and activities were distributed in nested contexts throughout the office setting. The design work was seen to be planned, self-organised and coordinated through a series of practical actions and events that occurred in different locations. There was no single, identifiable event, interaction or communicative medium in which the coordination of the design work occurred. From these insights, multidisciplinarity is proposed as a way of organising design work that cuts across some design interfaces. This way of procuring design services is contingent on the appointment of a design firm with multidisciplinary expertise, in an arrangement where the design work is undertaken collaboratively in a co-located setting with underpinning information systems.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | co-location; design coordination; design practice; ethnography; workplace studies |
| Index terms: | ethnography, ecology, design team, design firm, design practice, coordination, information system, interaction, co-location |
| Subjects: | design process, qualitative and interpretive research, management, behavioral psychology, information systems, practitioner, professional practice, environmental science, operations management |
| Topics: | Site Management, Organizational Design, Design Practice, Digital Applications, Sustainability, Roles and Professions, Research Practice |
| Descriptive scope: | 3 PCT |
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