Design tribes and information spaces for creative conversations

Abstract

This paper reports on work in progress to augment the role and practice of Creative Conversations in product design education. We describe changes in practice designed to elevate the importance of conversations and various pedagogical approaches used to support this elevation. These changes are principally manifested in the formation of like-minded Communities of Interest, or 'Design Tribes', the adoption of revised design process models and the associated reorganisation of assessment philosophy and practice. We go on to describe and reflect on various technological interventions deployed, that have been designed to weakly augment the conversation space in both situated (studio based contact sessions) and distributed (work undertaken in between contact sessions) settings.