Communication between people is commonly thought to play a major role in determining the success or failure of collaborative design projects. We conducted 8 weeks of observation and 62 interviews in three design companies. Our findings indicate that communication is blamed for causing many problems which are not of obvious technical nature. However, such problems are more often symptomatic of underlying factors related to information, representation, individual, team, and organisational issues. Examples of factors influencing communication at interfaces are people's understanding of the ‘sequence of tasks’ or ‘goals and objectives’ in the design process. With a system-theory informed conceptualisation of communication, we propose that awareness of such factors could assist design practitioners in targeting interventions and researchers in generating hypotheses about communication and design performance.

人们通常认为人与人之间的交流在决定协作设计项目的成败中起着重要作用。我们在三个设计公司进行了 8 周的观察和 62 次访谈。我们的研究结果表明，沟通被归咎于造成许多不属于明显技术性质的问题。然而，这些问题通常是与信息、代表、个人、团队和组织问题相关的潜在因素的症状。影响界面交流的因素的例子是人们对设计过程中“任务序列”或“目标和目的”的理解。以系统理论为基础的交流概念化，