Studying and Comparing Students’ Collaborative Practices in a Design Project

Abstract

In technology and engineering education, there is a growing emphasis on curricula that include collaborative design projects. However, detailed studies of how students interact over longer periods of time are rare. In this study, students in a design project in the fifth semester of the Architecture and Design programme at [anonymous] University are studied. The students had the task to design a real office building in collaborative groups of 5–6 students. Video (2–5 cameras per group) was used in situ to record students’ preparation for an upcoming status seminar. Drawing on interaction analysis, we have examined how students’ activities in different groups unfold across an entire day. The social interactions were found to be complex and dynamic. Students fluidly shifted between individual work, dyadic and triadic engagements, and full group collaboration across different spatial configurations. Moreover, their collaborative work progress in the design project was not static, nor did they follow predefined scripts. Instead, they were temporally evolving, contextual, deeply embodied, and challenging conventional dichotomies between cooperation and collaboration. However, a comparative analysis of the social interactions between the groups also displayed differences in how the students collaborated and how well they worked together within a group. The groups organised, structured and designed their collaborative practices differently over the period of an entire day. This raises the question of what the characteristics of good collaboration and good collaborative skills are? Moreover, through visits to design projects in high schools and at various years in university-level engineering education, we have also observed an apparent progression in students’ collaborative skills. This raises a second question: How should the development of these skills be best facilitated at different levels of education?