PART IV FINDINGS AND CONCLUSIONS
Picture 28: The group work –space Brain Storm
Overall, the teams were quite varied in their composition, but all had participants from at least two of the main schools of Aalto University (business, technology and art & design) – the business school being however clearly the most under-represented. The process through which the teams were created was based on the wishes of the student’s themselves as they applied for the course, i.e. they had to name the sponsor and project that interested them (and
also if they are interested in being a project manager for the team), and then the chosen project managers and the course coordinator from ADF together finalize the teams. In addition to Aalto University students, some groups had foreign students as well from collaborative universities, participating from distance e.g. from China or France.102
8.7.1 Organizing for interdisciplinary collaboration
How then did the PDP teams organize their work in practice? The teams are not given many limitations or structural guidance - they have to work their way of working out themselves.
“So like in principle we have the final deadline, that the prototype and report is ready by then, and the milestones in between are done so that the team has to set them themselves…Like really in the beginning we do the design brief and project plans, so in the design brief we define what really is, what really is to be solved and a agree a bit on that, and then in the project plan the milestones are independently defined and we go through them. So we have not set the milestones, the team in principle sets them themselves and suggest them to us, and then hopefully they can keep the timetable they have set.”
Staff member (Staff1)
For example I observed one instance where a project manager complained to Factory Director Ekman that some team members were not interested anymore, and motivation was lowering.
He responded “You make your rules as a group, as decisions are made by those who show up.
As a team you also decide how you as a team will do the things that need to be done.” The strong message was that teams needed to sort their challenges out themselves.
The projects took several different routes to getting their projects going. Some relied on dividing the tasks according to the apparent skills the team members had. The team is divided into teams accordingly, as is the task at hand that is also divided into corresponding sub-tasks.
“And we have really worked so that we have divided it fully so that there is the software side, the engineers and then design and marketing, and all work in their own group as their own team.”
102 During the project the geographically dispersed teams did meet, as there was a budget allocated for travelling.
Overall, the practices of interdisciplinary knowledge creation in such teams that had both divisions of disciplines as well as of geograhical distance would have merited more analysis. However, I decided not to include this aspect in my research due to the focus on collaboration within ADF premises.
Design student (SD2)
“…the division was clear right there when, like we had two electrical engineering students, and then we had – if you don’t count me and J [vice-project manager], the we had tree mechanical engineers and then one industrial designer, so there we had quite clear groups then, like how we do it.”
Engineering student (SE4)
“…I have to say that maybe a bit unfortunately we pretty much went along the lines of what people know or think they know…”
Engineering student (SE3)
Why then did this type of collaboration emerge? The reasons seem to have been two-fold.
First, the existence of natural and strong divisions between disciplines as sub-groups as well as having potential other dividing factors such as geographical dispersion - either location of some members in another country, or doing their daily work conveniently somewhere else than ADF.
“…we had, yeah, right from the beginning...of course they weren’t really independent at the start the sub-teams, but yeah we had them right from the start…they were pretty much the designers and engineers. It was already because they see each other often at TaiK and do their work there and they maybe have other courses there with each other and so on”
Engineering student (SE6)
“…well it’s pretty clear of course we can create the divisions real easy to two functional teams so that the other is of course at this end, here in Finland we have five guys and then at the Shanghai end there are four guys, so there is one pretty natural division….so there is kinda another division maybe so the technical side and then this more like design and idea generation, service concept oriented stuff, that was, kinda, like been separate.”
Engineering student (SE3)
As I talked to the various team members I sensed that if the team had these types of “natural”
divisions, then the resulting way of collaborating “just happened” quite organically, that is, it emerged as the most pragmatic way of working, not so much from an explicit decision, and pragmatic reasons also sustained the way of working.
“Yeah it’s been a good way, but on the other hand maybe we could’ve, at some point I tried it, that we combined work more, so the designers would not have been always one team, but instead maybe the designer and engineer would’ve been one team. It didn’t somehow maybe feel natural, the location was probably yeah one factor. And it has worked in my view like this, how it has been, really well.”
Engineering student (SE6)
Second, and almost as an opposite to the first reason observed, the strong management by the project manager towards this type of collaboration was evident as well in few projects. They chose to organize the project in a certain way, based on earlier experiences, own beliefs about best ways of working or reasons of efficacy. This is in contrast to the first observed reason, as this was wholly a managed process, an explicit choice of organizing in this manner.
“No like really I decided the division like that because earlier when I have been part of those types of multifunctional teams so like I don’t believe in the ‘let’s now do something nice together and accomplish a lot together’. Like it doesn’t result in anything but arguments and so on, so that was the reason I divided the group into those minigroups and each group handles its own skills and others help then if need be… We have gone pretty automatically forward and pretty much accomplished something all the time without there having been any stops. So in that sense this organizing has worked out well.
And indeed we have avoided that something comes up like ‘should we do this’ and then no-one really does it, and we just wonder about.”
Design student (SD2)
Interestingly, one student pondered if the above type of collaboration was indeed interdisciplinary at all:
“I think it indeed should be that they [disciplines] should go like side-by-side and not as separate pieces because if we do together then the results is much better…and then what happens if you put it in pieces like that it goes like it has always gone: the engineers do that and marketing guys do that part and like where is the collaboration kinda in that type of doing. Like is it really that anymore…The collaboration is in my mind like the most important thing.”
Business student (SB1)
Another way of organizing seemed to stem more from “just” deciding to do things together, or the problem given being so vague that a clear organization would have been difficult to achieve.
”…like when we have this interdisciplinary team so that first we’d tackle something irrelevant, like here we form the group, so maybe then we don’t disperse right away to groups. Like these are designers, these are coders, now they do this and they do that but instead first we do something together as a group. Do something that is new to everyone. And only after that we start doing, I guess it could help the doing.”
Engineering student (SE2)
”I was kinda surprised when there was talk that when we we were able to choose our teams, so it was like ’go ahead choose now an electrical engineer and mechanical engineer and designer, cause then you have a desginer, mechanical engineer and electrical engineer’. Well I got what I got and and I think I got a really good bunch, but we have like no such roles… It has been always like yeah, everyone has been away from one’s comfort zone and then at times like totally stupid…it creates that in some case you are in your element and in some cases so totally lost…thinking of learning we thought it best. Like
if we had divided it so that everyone had done according to their own talent, then there would have been missing a lot of that [learning].”
Engineering student (SE1)
”…well we have not done anything much separately at all. It was like really hard to think for example right in the beginning that like ok, this group would do this, and this would do this”.
Engineering student (SE7)
”in the beginning we did with the large group, like it was pretty slow, we could’ve split into smaller groups, we did that too and we always shuffled the cards. Then we didn’t have like you are a representative of this school, so you go there. We on purpose mixed things up totally, when we were generating ideas and developing the plans and stuff, so then we just happily did which ever way.”
Engineering student (SE5)
So it seems that despite a “push” to choose “a representative” from all disciplines, in some cases the group formed nicely without these “pre-set roles”. The groups that were organized in this collaborative manner, however, did utilize the specific knowledge of the participants in the later stages of their collaborative work.
“…once we choose which concepts to develop further and then of course we need to take more into account those strengths and look at what each can do.”
Engineering student (SE1)
”…soon as we start the building phase, I am sure there will be like groups who do their own thing.”
Engineering student (SE8)
The students also told me about the ambiguous nature of their problem, or their design brief being very broad; thus in order to make sense of the problem, they felt it best to work together without thinking too much “who knows what” because there was a “lack of not knowing”
what they in fact needed as a way of knowledge.
“…we were just given a task of ‘design an interface. So first we had to figure out what was the problem and then think of the solution to that problem.”
Engineering student (SE8)
Interesting to note, the groups within the ME310 course were to my understanding all organized in this manner. They did not have project management, and their problem
definition was also much more ambiguous and unstructured than the ones usually given in the PDP course103. The participants of ME310 in fact voiced their frustration in several occasions, and reflected on the difficulties of getting started in such a vague context.
“Like it didn’t really matter, who came from which school and like that, that you learn stuff then during the journey. Because it all stems from the user [as according to the Stanford Design process] like you don’t need to be an expert in anything, which I found really interesting.”
Design student (SD6)
This ambiguity of the task at hand was naturally a source of frustration as well.
“But in the beginning it was a bit, we didn’t believe the advice we were given, that one should just like decide to start doing something for first two weeks and if it doesn’t work then try something else. But just start doing something like its meant. But as our project was so loose, then making choices was hard and through that the fact that we were from such different backgrounds, so no-one was playing kind of in the most natural way. Or like we were outside our comfort zone, in a really mushy uncomfort-zone, and did not utilize at all what each would do best.”
University student (SU2)
The frustrations also stemmed from the “wasted time that doesn’t result in anything”, which was salient as the projects had, despite their vagueness, strict deadlines. This resulted in uncertainness that individuals coped with varying success and sometimes resulted in downright conflicts.
Interestingly, there was one group that had only male engineers in it – and as such, not what one might label a very interdisciplinary group - but to my view collaborated in a very
“interdisciplinary fashion” which contributed to an interdisciplinary learning experience.
Their project manager reflected on this as well.
”Learning a lot programming, I used to think it is very easy and straightforward, now I see it is very complicated, lot of things are correlated and a trade-off, not only from the books. I always coded alone, now I see differnet ways of coding. I like the fact that you build a proto from scratch actually doing something, something that is real in your hand. We met with all these designers and these diffenet people. We had to think more the other side cause we are all engineers, that’s been a new thing to do, brings new things to what we do. Made me realize what all that stuff is needed for, there is lot of other things than engineering needed in the world….”
Engineering student (SE9)
103 As opposed to PDP, in ME310 the way of organizing in fact explicitly originates from the design process used in the course, the Stanford Design Innovation Process, and as such it does not stem from the choices made
by the students themselves. For more information, see
http://web.stanford.edu/group/me310/me310_2014/about.html
I in fact thought about this some more in my field diary after meeting the group:
This was echoed by Factory Director Ekman noted to one group, who wanted to outsource some of their tasks to “professionals”: “in other groups they try to do with their own little hands, you might want to reconsider that…” encouraging the at least trying to do even though the team had no explicit expertise on the subject.
This resonates with my other observation told earlier that these types of teams were not so pre-occupied with the “roles” needed in the team, but took the team as it was, and built from that. It was more the people as personalities that in some cases seemed to guide to organizing rather than the roles that either were given – either by others or the ones one attributed to ones self.
“…the more diverse bunch of people you have involved right from the start you don’t in a way even need to think that ‘now marketing makes its marketing plan’ or implements it because it has been there right from the beginning and developed together. Maybe that’s why we are missing those boundaries because we have all done the same thing from the start, you sort of without noticing think about the things you would otherwise be like ‘let’s ask our marketing guru’ and she tells us her exhaustive answer.”
Engineering student (SE1)
“But if you think another way of saying it, so like a kind of, like in our group we have three very different personalities, and one is really systematic, and then another who gets upset if things don’t move along, and maybe then I can handle the uncertainty at some level, but like it doesn’t bother me, but then I am not maybe the most productive always…Yeah, but like maybe as a first thing if you come to an interdisciplinary course, you can think like ‘what’s my role in this project’, and that’s in my view kind of the pretty wrong way to think.”
Engineering student (SE13)
Field diary, 20.1.2011
!
When!all!are!”same!discipline”,!more!interdisciplinarity!learning!might!actually!
happen,!as!everyone!is!forced!to!learn!and!do!things!outside!own!areas!(e.g!
visuals,!service!design).!When!”representa<ves”!of!relevant!areas!is!present,!
everyone!is!more!likely!to!stay!in!their!own!”box”?!
!!
However, not all the team members experienced the organizing the same. Thus what the project manager may have meant as a very inclusive way of organizing was simultaneously experienced by one participant as “me doing alone at TaiK, and the engineers someplace and the electrical guys then somewhere in the basement and no-one goes to see what the others are doing”. Another example was when a member of one project told me that ”So that the feeling of doing together, that’s been kind of missing”, even though the project manager had just told me the opposite, that they did “everything together”. This once again underscores that participants experience things differently.
Finally, one project manager talked about the importance of motivation, and pondered that the effective organization of interdisciplinarity might be aided if everyone could do what they did best.
”One thing that’s interesting is really what I have learned during this course, is that people are most motivated when they do the thing they know how to do.”
Engineering student (SE2)
Regardless of the discipline to which one placed oneself, the group (or at least the project manager) had sensed the importance of giving value to all kinds of know-how that were present in the interdisciplinary group. One’s own input needs to be valued, and the resulting mutual respect enables fruitful co-operation. In a way this was present in all the projects I observed: at some point most did divide into task specific activities.
8.7.2 A story of a brainstorming session
In the IDP course (see Chapter 8,4), the students formed interdisciplinary groups - in this case meaning that there were to be participants from as many different schools or majors as possible. The course assignments were then to be accomplished as group work. I was kindly enough allowed to shadow one group of five students around during the course and attend their group meetings. The group consisted of two engineers and three students from the IDBM –program, two being design students and one from business school.