Output details

Coordination and emergence in design

The paper is part of a wider research program that aims to bring together individual/cognitive and social perceptions of the design process and design creativity. The paper focuses on the role of emergence in design and aims to reconcile two hitherto disparate approaches in the relevant literature: one that places emphasis on visual recognition (particularly on how individuals perceive shapes, behaviours and functions), to a great degree ignoring the dynamics of the interactions developed between individuals in a social context, and another that places emphasis on interaction and distributed processes of creation, but largely seems to ignore the role of individual cognition. The paper identifies the existence of three different types of emergence (generative, descriptive and observational) and builds a computational model to elucidate their meaning and role in design. The paper shows that this model of coordination can enrich our understanding of design emergence both as an outcome and a process. The paper is one of the few papers focussed on theorising emergence in design, although the notion is generally agreed to be important for our understanding of creative design. The treatment has repercussions for the way we understand and support creative design. It formed the basis for subsequent empirical-based research of design in teams, particularly the pilot study on Collaborative Design Workshops which was part of ‘The role of Complexity in the Creative Economy’ project funded by AHRC under the Connected Communities programme in 2011-2012.