Interest-based converge process: facilitating negotiation in collaborative design

• Authors: Susana B. La Luz-Houchin
• Venue: Procedings of the Second Conference on Creativity and Innovation in Design
• Year: 2011

Trends in design, business and education point to increased demand for the role of interdisciplinary collaboration. Designers are incorporating stakeholders into a collaborative design process in various ways to share expertise, ideas, resources, and/or responsibilities for the sake of developing solutions to problems. Conflict management is the leverage point for truly successful collaboration. While conflict is natural and desirable, if unmanaged, it will not go away, but only become more serious. Interest-based negotiation a method of managing conflict during which parties attempt to preserve their relationship and meet each side's needs as opposed to focusing on positions that may be incompatible. Traditional design processes have multiple iterations of diverging/generating and converging/making decisions. If multiple people from varying backgrounds are involved in this process, the convergent stage most frequently gives rise to differing perspectives and conflict. Given the high potential for conflict during convergent stages of a collaborative design process, the intent of this research is to develop a tool to help designers integrate interest-based negotiation into these stages for the purpose of facilitating collaborative design. By facilitating Interest-based negotiation during convergent stages with stakeholders, designers will be opening up their process to a more people-centered, collaborative perspective.