When groups decide to collaborate on an issue of mutual interest, there is initial excitement as they anticipate the new, innovative solutions that could emerge from joint problem-solving among people with various skills and perspectives. How to kick off a process of collaboration, however, is often unclear. This is where the real work begins.
The purpose of collaborative design is to jointly engage those at the table throughout the process. It includes jointly defining the problem to be addressed, identifying strategies to address the problem, and sharing results with stakeholders. Sometimes it also involves participants in research. A challenge is to organize the process to fit the time and resources people have available. It’s also important to find a way to identify and make use of the expertise and passion of the people in the room.
People who are new to organizing collaborative design may ask, “Where do we begin?” Here, we offer three ways to kick off a design process that have been created and effectively used by research-practice partnerships.
Getting Started
Commit to “working open”: The collaborative design process reflects the idea of “working open” that stems from the open source software and “open collaboration” (think Wikipedia) movements. The Hive Research Lab (HRL), discussed in the second example below, has taken up the idea of ‘working open’ as a natural fit for educational research-practice partnerships (RPPs). Collaborative learning and problem-solving are at the heart of not only professional learning communities, but also of scientific inquiry itself.
Commit to trust-building and facilitation: To effectively collaborate with people who bring a variety of experiences and forms of expertise, it is crucial to create a safe space that allows full participation. Taking a little time to begin with team building, trust building, and deep listening exercises can go a long way in being ready and willing to work together. Strong facilitation–ideally by a ‘boundary spanner’ who has experience with the viewpoints represented by the group–is key in negotiating shared goals and an agreed-upon process that together set the stage for collaborative work.
Example 1: The CILT Process
The Center for Innovative Learning Technologies (CILT) was a research center funded in the late 1990s-early 2000s that developed and studied solutions to critical problems in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning. Based on the belief that the study of science itself is a process of collaborative inquiry that integrates knowledge from various sources, CILT took a similar stance toward the development of solutions to problems in STEM.
In curriculum design efforts, for example, CILT teams used a “Partnership Inquiry Process” that brought together a variety of education, design, research, and science experts to agree on shared goals and deliberate on inquiry-based science curriculum. Through this process, as collaborators “walk in each others’ shoes,” knowledge becomes distributed, integrated and refined across the group. In one case, this process resulted in rich new science curriculum and instructional methods that enacted principles of making science accessible, making thinking visible, and providing supports for learning.
Another collaborative process used by CILT, shown in Figure 1, scaffolds a process of jointly deciding which “root causes” to work on toward an aim of shared goals. (See here [link to Bill & Molly’s blog post] for systematic ways of defining root causes to the problem of interest.) As indicated in the figure, green-shaded steps show participation centered on individual contributions, while blue-shaded steps are jointly accomplished.
Figure 1. The CILT Process of Developing Shared Goals
This process of developing shared goals has been used, for example, in an RPP network meeting to help develop a list of tools for partnerships. It was also used at a Research + Practice Collaboratory Inquiry Group meeting to discuss common problems regarding implementation of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematical Practice and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) for science and engineering.
Any collaborative design process ideally will bring together participants across relevant areas of expertise in line with the “Partnership Inquiry Process.” The CILT process of developing shared goals is especially helpful for groups to organize quickly around common interests. It’s best to agree on shared goals, in fact, before proceeding to a deeper collaborative design process, such those discussed in the next two examples.
Example 2: Hive’s Design Charrette
The story goes that for 19th century architecture students in Paris, the term “en charrette” meant, “to draw at the last moment” in order to get finished drawings on the collection cart–i.e., the charrette–just before the deadline. Increasingly popular in urban planning and architecture, “charrettes” or “design charrettes” now refer to multi-day, cross-disciplinary workshops designed to facilitate discussion among the stakeholders of a particular project.
The Hive Research Lab (HRL) brought the concept of charrettes to design-based research circles, initiating their growing use in education RPPs. HRL has effectively used design charrettes in their work of studying and improving the broader Mozilla Hive NYC Learning Network, which connects 55 out-of-school educational organizations with adolescent youth programs throughout New York City.
Design charrettes proceed in three major stages that HRL calls backgrounding, ideating, and refining:
Stage 1: Backgrounding. Participants share relevant knowledge from their own areas of expertise. The group articulates and maps related available resources. Participants then work together to specify the problem(s) they aim to solve and identify their root causes as the basis for their design work together.
Stage 2: Ideating. Taking what has been developed in the backgrounding phase, participants brainstorm and develop a variety of ideas that might be experimented with in order to tackle these problems, and figure out which might be viable.
Stage 3: Refining. Participants hone in on a smaller set of ideas that seem most promising, go through a group process to refine them, and come up with more detailed plans of what they might look like in practice by writing up a “minimal viable product” plan.
As one part of a larger Plan-Study-Do-Act cycle, HRL has used design charrettes in a variety of ways to both define their work and solve specific problems. For example, one design charrette focused on how to provide ‘pathway experiences’ for youth that could connect to their professional futures. In order to address a noticeable “slump” in youth’s trajectories after participation in Hive programs, adult and adolescent participants came together to identify root causes of the problem, collaboratively design solutions, and test and reflect on their ideas. Participants reflected on the benefits of thinking outside their “normal stream of thought” to make meaningful changes to Hive youth trajectories.
In another example, at the 2014 International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) hosted by the CU-Boulder School of Education, design charrette sessions offered a chance to learn about this tool in the context of problems of interest. In one session, adult learning scientists and rising high school freshmen invented middle-school level learning experiences about climate change. With adolescents drawing on a range of resources such as share-able apps and a ‘gaming’ approach, adult participants–from museum directors to climate scientists–were able to take on youths’ perspectives while pressing on students’ ideas through scientific principles and real world constraints. In another session, adult learning scientists created three-dimensional models of innovative, functional learning spaces (see photo).
The strength of the design charrette is its structure that puts people with different kinds of expertise on a level playing field by making them work fast and in the moment together. This tool is not about creating a perfect solution in one sitting, but rather about maximizing the value of bringing multiple perspectives together to get it “mostly right fast” with the potential for further development later.
