The Oscillation between Individual and Social Designing in Co-located Student Teams

Contemporary approaches to the study of design teams tend to assume that teamwork equates to social interactions, thereby failing to examine the extent to which design team processes involve the assumed joint attention and shared dialogue. Nowadays, mobile personal computing devices enable a situation where almost the entire design process can be carried out anywhere at any time. This also enables teams to work in co-located settings on joint and individual tasks, which allows for both individual and social creative processes during the organised teamwork. In this perspective, this article explores the oscillation between co-located individual and social design activity in student teams. To study the shift from individual to social activity within design teamwork, we surveyed 23 h of student teams’ activity amongst 25 high-school students by coding and analysing 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 varying degrees of joint attention, and that the joint attention may be established more successfully through analogue and shared digital communicative resources.