Making sense of collaboration: the challenge of thinking together in global design teams

Industry globalization brings with it inevitable changes to traditional organizational structures. The notion of global virtual teams, working together across geographical, cultural and functional borders, is becoming increasingly appealing. This paper presents observations of how a team of designers negotiate shared understanding in the collaborative design of Virtual Pedals for Volvo Car Corporation. Although the team was globally distributed during most of the development process, examples are drawn from collocated design sessions, since this enables careful examination of the multifaceted ways in which collocated designers use a wide variety of artifacts and techniques to create common ground. The findings highlight the situational and interactional characteristics of design collaboration and suggest that the addition of shared 'objects to think with' in distributed design environments could greatly facilitate global design teams in their collaborative process of 'thinking together apart'.