Dear Jennifer and all,
Thank you Jennifer for pointing at this issue.
For the last decade I have been actively working as both a design facilitator as well as designing researcher in various collaborative projects (more than 10 projects with industry partners), and I’ve grown to learn that the skill to facilitate is a very important skill in today’s design context. Through effective facilitation it is possible not only to harness the human resources and understandings that are brought together into design events, but also to bring the materials that matter for the project on stage in a constructive manner. I’d be glad to see research on this topic to grow substantially.
As an answer to some of your questions, I would say that there are fundamental similarities between design facilitation and the facilitatory work that educators do. Parallels are easy to see if we look at the work in terms of “guided construction of knowledge” (which I have adopted from an education scholar Neil Mercer). In my own research I have studied innovation design processes through the lens of learning, which have yielded insights into the capacity of the design team to become able to speak of the complexity that they face through a simpler conceptual lens.
A key difference that I see between what educators do as compared to design facilitation is that design facilitators work to enable a team to learn about something that has never existed before, whereas, educators typically have a priori understandings of some kind that they want their audience to conceive of. This per se may not necessarily cause differences for the facilitation of the learning events, but rather, the key difference stems from how deep and sustained learning is being sought after.
I have tried to find materials on design facilitation, and it seems scarce - especially when searching for materials with this term. The most interesting papers I’ve found on this are:
Berry, M. (1993). Changing Perspectives on Facilitation Skills Development. Journal of European Industrial Training, 17(3). doi:10.1108/03090599310026355
Kolfschoten, G. L., Hengst-Bruggeling, M., & Vreede, G.-J. (2007). Issues in the Design of Facilitated Collaboration Processes. Group Decision and Negotiation, 16(4), 347–361. doi:10.1007/s10726-006-9054-6
Wardale, D. (2008). A Proposed Model for Effective Facilitation. Group Facilitation: A Research & Applications Journal, 9, 49 – 58.
There seems to be an association to design facilitators (IAF), and they have published some works. I, nevertheless, was hoping to see more theoretical depth in these studies. But, practical experiences there seems to be plenty.
(Sorry for the rather long posting)
Kind regards,
Dr. Salu Ylirisku
Leader of the Embodied Design Group
Aalto University
Department of Design / Research
http://designresearch.aalto.fi/groups/edg/
PS: Personally I am currently interested in studying design facilitation with the framing analysis method that I have been developing. In case you are interested in learning more about the method you may contact me personally, or check my academia.edu page: https://aalto-fi.academia.edu/SaluYlirisku
PS2: I have (with a student of mine) also been inspecting productive facilitation-in-action by inspecting how facilitators work to set (or participate in setting of) frames for collaborative action. This work is still in progress hopefully we get it published next year.
On 16 Sep 2014, at 02:40, Jennifer Smerdel <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> As participatory design and co-design are becoming increasingly popular I want to know what you all think of design facilitation in participatory research.
>
> What is the difference between a designer who is facilitating a group of participates through a process versus a business person or an educator? Or is there a difference? Who out there is practicing what we call "design facilitation" and are there different best practices/frameworks/components even within design facilitation?
>
> Any and all comments are welcome as well as links to any scholarly research you all think may be helpful in answering these questions even further!
>
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
> Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|