Collaboration in professional design practice

Yumeng Xie's PhD Dissertation

Yumeng Xie's Ph.D. dissertation was a qualitative study that aimed to provide a deeper understanding of how designers collaborate in professional design practice. Based on those theoretical and empirical insights, this multiple-case study could provide an opportunity to shed empirical light on collaboration theories/models for designers to perform better in professional design practice. Findings and lessons learned can be generalized and utilized in professional design practice. In the long term, this study could enlighten and provide theoretical implications to design education for preparing future design practitioners. Her dissertation committee members were Mauricio Mejía (chair), Danah Henriksen, and John Takamura.

Methods:

  • In-depth interviews
  • Case study
  • Quantitative content analysis

Outcomes:

  • Xie, Y. & Mejía, G. M. (Under review). Understanding and Preparing Others
    for Collaboration in Design: An Interview Study of Professionals in the
    U.S.
  • Xie, Y., Mejía, G. M., & Zheng, W. (2021). An exploratory study of co-design skills in the US job postings. Proceedings IASDR 2021. 9th Congress of the International Association of Societies of Design Research, Hong Kong, China.
  • Xie, Y., Mejía, G. M., Coseo, P., & Cheng, C. (2020). A Participatory Design Case Study in Environmental Design Education. Proceedings of the 16th Participatory Design Conference 2020 - Participation(s) Otherwise - Volume 2, 87–94. https://doi.org/10.1145/3384772.3385152