Elsevier

Design Studies

Volume 77, November 2021, 101045
Design Studies

Objectivation in design team conversation

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2021.101045Get rights and content

Highlights

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    Objectivation turns thinking into social objects that can organize local orderliness.

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    Design conversations can exhibit patterns of objectivation.

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    Objectivation shows how teams can engage with design issues without resort to design methods.

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    Studying objectivation helps show how design can emerge out of ordinary social interactions.

In this article we report our study of objectivation in the conversation of a design team. Objectivation is the practical work in which groups engage to produce social objects that facilitate orderly collaboration. We observed how design team members came to agree on specific details about an educational simulation they were designing, as they treated simulation features like independent social facts that could be affected by and have effects on other simulation features, and that had discrete benefits that made them an asset within the product. In our report we describe patterns of objectivation in their conversation that produced these results. We conclude by discussing how our study relates to, and enriches, the findings provided by prior design research.

Section snippets

Studying design as situated action

We position our research in the body of literature that has investigated design from the point of view of it being “a kind of situated action. . . . [that] emerges over time, in unique circumstances, with other people, through complex, situated acts of seeing, saying, and doing” (Fleming, 1998, p. 41). This research is often conducted from an ethnomethodological (Garfinkel, 1967) or conversation analysis (Sacks, 1992) perspective. In these views, rather than assuming the order found in any

Case selection

This paper is a case study of how a design team responded to an issue that arose during a project, drawing on the concept of objectivation as an interpretive framework. Our case is drawn from ethnographic data we have gathered in our long-term study of a team designing educational simulations to teach teamwork in the context of STEM disciplines. This team, distributed across three universities (two R1 and one R2 institutions), and collaborating through video conferencing technology, was

Findings

During the meeting segments we analyzed, Alex, Carol, Heather, and Mary identified distinct elements of the simulation they were designing, described specific details and configurations of those elements, and agreed on their inclusion in the product. All these focused around an aspect of the simulation's storyline that we will refer to as student failure, or the consequences that followed if students failed to complete an assigned task. However, what our participants were doing was not a result

Discussion and implications

We have highlighted how our participants came to agree to specific details about student failure's place in the simulation story as they objectivated it into an independent social fact, that could be affected by and have effects on other simulation features, and that had discrete benefits that made it an asset within the narrative. These details emerged as responses to Carol's surprise about a story possibility that Alex raised, and not as intentional attempts to generate design specifications.

Conclusion

Our purpose in this study has been to explore some of the unplanned, emergent methods a design team employed to respond to a project issue, using the concept of objectivation as an interpretive lens. We observed members of the team treat student failure as a configurable object in the narrative of an educational simulation they were designing, that could be affected by and have effects on other simulation features, and that had discrete benefits that made it an asset to the simulation. The

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Funding

Part of this work was supported by the National Science Foundation grant number 1915620.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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