Search for: All records

Communication and collaboration are key components of engineering work (Trevelyan, 2014), and teamwork, including interdisciplinary teamwork, is increasingly seen as an important component of engineering education programs (Borrego, Karlin, McNair, & Beddoes, 2013; Male, Bush, & Chapman, 2010, 2011; Paretti, Cross, & Matusovich, 2014; Purzer, 2011). Employers and education researchers alike advocate teamwork as a means of developing skills that engineering graduates need (Purzer, 2011), and accreditation bodies consider the ability to both lead and function on teams as an important outcome for engineering graduates (Engineers Australia, 2017). However, “despite the clear emphasis on teamwork in engineering and the increasing use of student team projects, our understanding of how best to cultivate and assess these learning outcomes in engineering students is sorely underdeveloped (McGourty et al., 2002; Shuman, Besterfield-Sacre, & McGourty, 2005)” (Borrego et al., 2013, p. 473). In order to contribute to the current conversation on interdisciplinary teamwork in engineering education, and to advance understandings of how best to cultivate teamwork learning outcomes, this paper discusses the most common teamwork challenges and presents boundary negotiating artifacts as a conceptual framework for addressing them. Drawing on data from long-term ethnographic observations of a design competition project, and the challenges students experienced, we utilise findings from a systematic literature review and the conceptual framework of boundary negotiating artifacts to present a case study of how boundary negotiating artifacts can support important teamwork constructs. 

Interdisciplinary teams must figure out ways to navigate team members’ differing disciplinary backgrounds and successfully communicate with one another. This can prove challenging because disciplines comprise unique cultures, goals, perspectives, epistemologies, methodologies, and languages.1 Consequently, communication is among the most frequently cited challenges to interdisciplinary collaboration, and developing communication skills is widely recognized as an important facet of teamwork.2 Yet, “Newcomers often underestimate the challenges of interdisciplinary work and, as a rule, do not spend sufficient time to allow them to overcome difference and create common ground, which in turn leads to frustration, unresolved conflicts, and...discontinued work.”3 Thus, it is important that teams establish common ground in terms of shared language, concepts, and goals.4 Boundary negotiating artifacts (BNAs) are one way in which interdisciplinary teams can establish common ground and facilitate communication between team members. BNAs are artifacts and inscriptions that coordinate perspectives and align different communities of practice so that they can collaboratively solve design problems.5 They facilitate transmission of information across disciplinary boundaries, allow team members to learn from other disciplines, create shared understanding of a design problem, and communicate important information. The concept of BNAs emerged out of boundary object traditions in the field of Science and Technology Studies, and is an attempt to overcome limitations of the original concept. More specifically, BNAs add nuance and depth to studies of the complex, non-routine projects which designers increasingly face as they work to address societal challenges. Focusing on the daily micro-level practices of designers reveals communication processes and facets of design work that otherwise remain unseen and are not revealed through either normative descriptions of design work or through interviews alone. Boundary negotiating artifacts provide a framework to study just such daily micropractices and inscriptions. We suggest that boundary negotiating artifacts are a timely and essential concept for multiple stakeholders in academia and the workplace. This paper presents a theoretical exploration of BNAs and their roles in design teams, supported by an empirical example from a long-term ethnographic study. The three-fold aim of this paper is to present BNAs as: 1) a theoretical and methodological tool for other researchers, 2) a pedagogical tool for faculty members, and 3) a conceptual tool for team members themselves.