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Articulating (mis)understanding across design discipline interfaces at a design team meeting

This paper advances understanding of the ways that ambiguities and uncertainties, as different types of misunderstanding, are manifest in complex projects by examining the conversation at a design meeting. This is a development from previous research that has explored the characteristics of design ambiguity and uncertainty in theory, to provide an empirical-basis to the study of misunderstanding. It does this by analysing conversation in fine-grained detail, informed by the theory and method of ethnomethodological conversation analysis. This approach offers a particular way of analysing and then accounting for the organisation of actions in time. It is through close attention to actions sequentially, as one thing happens after another, that in the successive conversational moves several ambiguities in the engineer’s shared understanding of the design of a plant room can be seen, as well as uncertainties that arise because of design information that is not yet available. Analytic attention to order and sequence was central of provide novel insight into the intertwined nature of the design ambiguities and uncertainties observed. These were not easy to locate neat, discrete entities in conversation but over the course of the meeting misunderstandings that initially seemed to be of one kind then transpired to be another. This insight is significant to the way we coordinate design work, decide what to do next on a project and assign responsibilities for the production of information. Indeed, while there is a movement to develop tools to aid automated problem-solving this observation highlights some difficulties in this. It does, however, show potential in the application of conversation analysis as a method to locate structure in conversation, which may assist pattern location in NLP and machine learning. The cross-disciplinary relevance of this research was evident in selection for publication in the AI EDAM special issue ‘Studying and supporting design communication’.