The In-Group: Sharing the Same Role Within Co-Design

• In Event: 54.042 - Co-Design in Practice: Seven Case Studies

Abstract

Purposes
The purpose of this study is to analyze role taking and collaborative structures within a co-design process of a small team tasked with designing products for members of a larger research practitioner partnership. The four doctoral students who were the participants in the smaller design team collaborated on a launch project for a comprehensive yearlong course. They created and revised this unit at a project based learning (PBL) conference, and specifically designed for both the principal investigators and the participating teachers. The analysis of this collaborative process questions how audience, and heterogeneous grouping played into how both researchers and teachers were both assigned and adopted roles.

Perspectives
The presence of multiple roles are a defining feature of co-design and will be examined throughout this study as a means of understanding how researchers--all of whom were past teachers--seamlessly switched between teacher/researcher roles depending on expected audience and participants. Positioning within this study is seen as a discursive act—looking at the written design documents during and after the co-design process and the subsequent assignment of roles and actions taken up or given by participants (Harré, 2004).

Data sources
Our co-design team worked exclusively between July 12th-July 16th at a PBL conference located in California. The design team met for 8 hours each day, informally designing during lunch and conference presentations. Our team worked exclusively on Google drive, collecting running notes that were synchronously available to the larger design team, and also documented thinking on large paper and post its.

Methods and modes of inquiry
Data was analyzed using the constant comparative method (e.g., Strauss, 1987) mapping how candidate's’ role and participation shift and transform throughout the design process. Specifically, I engaged in open coding, axial coding, and selective coding. Through a recursive examination of the data, I named, categorized, and subcategorized key themes about role taking and design that emerged. I then mapped the constitutive relations between and among these categories and examined individual codes in an effort to reveal interactional patterns.

Warrants for arguments/point of view
Although Co-design is often defined as a collaboration that encourages participants to take on defined roles in which the kinds of participation shift according to the needs and iterations of the design (Ormel et al., 2012 ), research on how individuals weave in and out of various roles depending on audience and heterogeneity within the design group is underdeveloped.

Scholarly significance of the work
My findings contribute significantly to the body of literature aimed at understanding how roles and identities contribute to co-design. It is in many ways a response to the criticism around the well documented disconnect between educational research and practice (Vanderlinde & van Braak, 2010). By understanding how participants can take on both the role of practitioner and researcher, this study reimagine ways how research methodology can bridge identities and fields.

Author

• Mary Rose Kelly, University of Colorado - Boulder