Conflict on collaborative design teams: understanding the role of social identities

Social identity theory provides an appropriate framework for analyzing social collaborative design, in which design team members have different design identities, that is, sets of beliefs, attitudes, and values about design. Observations of novice and professional design teams support the notion that collaboration is influenced by designers' adherence to, and reaction against, idealized technology-centered and socially-centered categorizations of themselves and users. Both case studies demonstrated the challenges to developing a superordinate team identity when polarized ideals about design and collaboration exist. However, approximately half of the professional design team members attempted to synthesize multiple viewpoints in response to the polarized identities, suggesting that design identities serve not only to differentiate design team members from other team members, but also as anchoring points for discussions about design. In theoretical terms, social identity assists researchers in modeling how social considerations influence technology design. In practice, encouraging designers to reflect on design identities can improve collaboration.