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"Slow" Collaboration: Some uses of vagueness, hesitation and delay in design collaborations

This peer-reviewed article was developed from an invited position paper presented at a workshop on the quality of design collaboration. The article makes reference to McDonnell’s own work (including an extract from an otherwise unpublished study) and the work of colleagues who study fine-grained, and thus often overlooked, critical features of design collaboration. It argues that many quantitative measures of collaboration quality (for instance measures of precision, categorical decision making, and time efficiency) fail to take into account the critically constructive roles that vagueness, hesitation and delay play in making collaboration possible. The article therefore raises fundamental questions about the status of conventional measures used as indicators of design collaboration quality.

The article appears in a special issue of the ‘International Reports on Socio-informatics’, published by the ‘International Institute for Socio-Informatics’ which promotes research at the intersection of computer, social, and learning sciences and design.