Co-Located Team Designing: The Oscillation Between Individual and Social Processes

Contemporary approaches to the study of design teams tend to assume that teamwork is entirely social, thereby failing to examine the extent to which design team processes involve the assumed joint attention and social collaboration. Nowadays mobile devices enable a situation where almost the entire design process is carried out in a team co-located setting, which allows for both individual and social creative processes during teamwork. In this perspective, this article explores the oscillation between co-located individual and social design activity. To study the shift from individual to social activity within design teamwork, we surveyed 23 hours of team activity amongst 25 high-school students by coding and analyzing captured video of their teamwork while working in a self-imposed manner on a design task. We found that different creative sub-processes, such as information search, problem defining, idea generation, decision-making, and feedback, foster different degrees of joint attention, and that the joint attention may be established more successfully through analogue and shared digital communicative resources.