The Collaborative Design Process

     Collaborative design processes have been documented for use in everything from community planning to software development for at least forty years. Whether going by the name participatory design, cooperative design, collaborative design, user-centered design, or other terms, the concept is the same. Someone initiates a project or an organization, and then, instead of developing that project on their own, they bring in collaborative partners to work with them. In recent years, product design firms like IDEO have greatly enhanced the public profile of user-centered design and have argued that integrating intended end-users into the design process results in products that are more likely to succeed in the market and introduces new product ideas that may also be successful down the road. IDEO doesn’t engage end-users to give participants beneficial educational experiences; these product designers believe that their "audience" will respond better to products designed with collaborative processes.

     In addition to helping the bottom line, user-centered design has emerged as a particularly useful technique when moving into new markets. As companies "go global," designers are being asked to design products for intended users from countries and backgrounds they may have never encountered. In these foreign environments, partnering with intended end-users is often the most effective way to understand how your product will work in the new market.

     User-centered design of this type goes beyond prototyping or offering focus groups with intended end-users. In 2009, IDEO published a free e-book on human-centered design written specifically for non-profits and NGOs working in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. In this guide, they offered specific design techniques for how to partner with intended users to do field research, develop project ideas, evaluate prototypes, assess program viability, and deliver pilot projects. While your goal may not be to improve drinking water quality in Zambia, many of the techniques described in the IDEO book apply to cultural project development processes as well.

     Early in their book, the IDEO authors stated, "The foundation of Human-Centered Design is a concise Design Challenge. This challenge will guide the questions you will ask in the field resesarch and the opportunities and solution you develop later in the process."  Collaborative museum design processes must also start with a clear and well-understood design challenge or goal. These challenges are the basis for how you will recruit participants, what you will ask of them, and what you will create in partnership. Sample challenges might include, "How can we tell the story of the Inuit experience in a way that is authentic, respectful, and compelling to non-native audiences (and credible for Native audiences SB) ?" or "Can we give teenagers with AIDS the tools to document their own daily experience in a way that supports their creative development, is sensitive to their privacy, and accessible to other audiences?" or "Can amateurs develop interactive exhibits for our music and technology exhibition?" Each of these questions implies different target collaborators and design processes. In the least intensive collaborations, collaborators may serve as "advisory boards" or consultants with whom staff have occasional design meetings throughout the project development. At their most intensive, collaborators and staff may work side by side to develop and implement the project.

     The development of the traveling exhibition Yuungnaqpiallerput/The Way We Genuinely Live: Masterworks of Yup'ik Science and Survival at the Anchorage Museum is a good example of both the successes and challenges of collaborative partnerships. The Anchorage Museum collaborated with an outside advisory group of Yup'ik elders to develop an exhibition that displayed Yup'ik objects, stories, and perspectives related to science. An anthropologist, Ann Riordan, served as the guest curator for the exhibition. Riordan was the liaison between the Yup'ik committee, Anchorage Museum staff, and associated design teams for the exhibition. During exhibition planning, Riordan held three meetings: one with the Yu'pik committee, and two with the entire team. The Yu'pik committee's stories and desires drove the exhibition development, and Riordan made sure that they were consulted on all meaningful decisions. But when it came to the implementation, Riordan became their advocate to the design team, invoking the spirit, if not always the letter, of their preferences.

     The final exhibition told the stories in ways that were authentic to the Yu'pik committee's experience and decisions, but the Yu'pik elders were not directly involved in the final design or fabrication of the exhibition. As Riordan noted, "real collaboration--really bringing everyone together--is very, very expensive." While she felt positively about the development process and the final result, Riordan wished that there had been more opportunities for members of the Yu'pik committee to have direct involvement in the implementation and presentation of the exhibition. She lobbied unsuccessfully for the museum to retain a full- or part-time Yu'pik staff member. Riordan commented that during development, she had "curatorial standing" to push through particular decisions that were important to the Yu'pik, such as the integration of Yu'pik language in the label copy, but once the exhibition was opened, it became the property of the museum and subject to its institutional strategies and rules around traveling exhibitions.

     While the collaboration between the Anchorage Museum and the Yu'pik elders yielded a successful product from all parties' perspectives, it did not chart the course for continued involvement by the collaborators with the institution. That partnership persisted between Riordan and the Yu'pik committee, but the collaboration with the Museum was a one-time experience, fueled by grant funding. Like many collaborations, the Yu'pik project allowed the institution to meaningfully "plug in" new people and ideas without fundamentally altering the institutional process or values. (Are you making the assumption that a collaborative project should alter institutional process/values as well as create a good exhibition outcome? I don't think that was the intent of this collaboration on the part of the participants or the Native advisors. The collaboration was a tool to development of a significant exhibition, not possible without the Native partnership. All parties held the goal to create a major authentic presentation of Yup'ik life and ways of knowing/being. SB)

     I realize this may sound critical of the Anchorage Museum, but it's often a reality of what is possible when an institution considers collaborating with outside groups.( Question of what is possible, and also of what is intended. SB) For the Anchorage Museum and other institutions pursuing collaborations, the ceding of content authority is quite significant, and institutions feel that they cannot reasonably ensure a positive result if they cannot control the process by which that collaboratively-developed content is produced. In many cases, collaborators are only available or funded for a short time, and institutions seek to employ them in the ways that will be most beneficial to all parties. While from Riordan's perspective, the Yu'pik project could have been more co-creative, it was a collaboration made possible by the resources and cultural differences present at the time.

     When the collaborators are youth (and they often are), institutional goals related to providing participants with educational experiences often become more explicit and essential to the project. In the case of Investigating Where We Live and other projects I've worked on, the overall design process typically breaks down into about one-third instructional time, two-thirds teen-driven production time. Weaving instruction into a collaboration is not easy; you have to develop and maintain equitable partnership relationships at the same time as you reinforce old standards about who is the authoritative instructor and who are the students. For this reason, it's a mistake to front-load all of the instruction to the first days or weeks of the program; that sets an expectation that the whole program will be "business as usual" with teachers as authoritative leaders and students as followers. Front-loading can also cause exhaustion in later weeks, especially in intensive programs where participants spend several hours each day working on the project. Like most people, youth participants can get fatigued if they are constantly "working on the project," and later in the program, instructional sessions can often be fun breaks that help participants shift focus and gather additional skills useful for their projects. 

     In the best cases, much of the instruction can be dictated by the needs of the youth participants themselves. For example, when I work with participants (of any age) on projects where they are designing exhibits, objects, or activites that draw on their own creative interests, I try to use the initial stages to introduce them to as many unique examples as possible rather than prescriptively showing them a small set of tools or paths to take. Then, I ask participants to write proposals for the projects they would like to do, and I try to find instructors or advisors who can come in specifically to help those participants with the tools they want to use, working from their particular levels of expertise. Especially when working with young people and technology, it's ridiculous to assume that everyone is starting from the same base or has the same knowledge and interest in different tools. Students can improve their skills more quickly and significantly when they can receive specific instruction at their level with tools they consider essential to their work. Guest instructors and flexible instruction schedules also help reinforce the collaboration between institution and participants. Participants see this kind of instruction as supportive to their needs rather than imposed from outside. From a relationship perspective, it's useful to bring in guest instructors and experts, as well as using past graduates or other youth as instructors because this allows students to receive instruction while still perceiving the program directors as partners or facilitators, not teachers.

    In 2008, I worked with the Chabot Space Science Center in Berkeley, CA, to develop a new program like Investigating Where We Live in which teens designed media components for a Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics exhibition on black holes. The teens spent three weeks together in the Black Hole Institute, Monday through Friday during the summer, and were paid a small stipend for their participation. The Black Hole Institute was a collaboration nestled within a collaboration; the Center for Astrophysics partnered with Chabot to provide the teens, and Chabot partnered with the teens to produce the exhibit content. As noted in the first chapter of this book, despite what we thought was a crystal-clear design question, teens felt frustrated in the early stages of the development process by a lack of clear criteria for what would constitute successful media products. 

     The Center for Astrophysics had a very simple design challenge in mind: "Can teens create media products related to black holes that we could integrate into our exhibit?" but that wasn't enough for the teen collaborators. They wanted specific feedback so that they could fulfill their own needs to produce an excellent product worthy of inclusion in the final exhibition. While this desire to produce something of high quality was partially fueled by participants' general desire to perform well, it also may have reflected a suspicion that the institution would not hold up to its side of the bargain if the outcome was poor. The exhibition to which the teens were contributing was at a very early stage of development, and no one was able to satisfactorily explain to either the teens or the Chabot staff where and how the teen media products would be integrated into the final exhibition. Would they be in the exhibition itself or only on the exhibition's website? Would their work be in a special "teen" area or woven into the general content? The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics team promised that the media would be included on the exhibition website, but that website was several months from being initiated. There was no initial design, no graphics, and no idea of where the teens' work would fit into an overall structure.  It's not surprising that the teens felt insecure about where their work might be going, and that they responded to that insecurity by asking for as many criteria as possible to ensure that their products would be desirable to include in the final, mysterious result.

     When that result emerged months later, the teens' projects were buried deep in the exhibition website as a set of "Youth Media Project" links. Rather than being integrated into the site itself, the exhibition website linked out to the teens' project websites. This made the teens' projects look like hangers-on rather than part of the overall exhibition. Because the teens were not given full design and content criteria for what would constitute success, when the Harvard team later developed their website, the teens' projects were not seen as congruous and valuable enough to promote or even integrate into the site. As of this writing, neither the Harvard team nor the Chabot staff had shown the teen participants where their projects had ended up. It's hard to imagine that the teens would have felt entirely satisfied to see what had happened to their work.

     When developing collaborative projects in which participants and staff work together to produce an exhibition, event, or educational program, it is important to balance the equitable partner relationship with participants' need for structure, clarity, and criteria. Just as contributors to simpler projects like to know how their work will be evaluated and used, collaborators also want to understand the specific reasons and outcomes of their work. No one likes to work on a team or committee without a clear goal in mind, and volunteer participants are no different from staff in this regard. Respect the fact that your collaborators have made a significant committment to join your project, submitting themselves to an application process and dedicating time and effort to the project. They want to be real contributors, not just screw around. Of course, you can make their work a more fun version of staff duties (and give them the most fun parts of real work to do), but it's important to maintain the overall stance that their activities are in pursuit of a goal that is valued and needed by the institution.

     One of the most effective ways to clarify the structure and goals of a collaborative project is to give participants a client to serve. At Chabot, we were lucky to have a representative from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics come twice during the Black Hole Summer Institute to review the teen projects and offer her feedback. Having a client to embody the goals can help participants get on the right track, even when those goals are fuzzy.

     The client need not even be real. The most extreme example of this is the writing programs at the 826 tutoring centers across the US. At 826, student groups come in for short programs in which they work together to write a book, which must be completed by the end of the program. The staff present themselves as assistants to a tyrannical publisher, a monster who eats books. The publisher is never seen but is portrayed by a staff member hidden in a closet who angrily pounds on the door and shouts out orders and demands. The staff ask the students to help them write a book to satisfy the publisher. This sets up an emotional bond between students and staff, an artificial collaborative device that helps the students get motivated and feel connected to the staff. The invisible publisher is an entirely fictitious device used to create criteria, add drama, and help focus the kids on what would otherwise be an overwhelmingly open creative project. ( Again, it seems that you are presenting important info at the end and downplaying as 'artificial'. Consider the pattern of this work at 826. Rather than a dyad of teacher and student, or tutor and student, there is a three-part system including the publisher. The dynamic of what is possible has changed radically with introduction of the third party. This is the essential 'magic' of mediation. It allows a different relationship between the two parties due to the intervention of a third. The students are more able to take the direction from an outside party. 826 is a great demonstration of the results. What is your sense of the outcomes of these efforts? Have you read any of the books? SB)

Continue to the next section, or return to the outline.