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essentially a human-based, interdisciplinary teamwork, and must be modeled as
sociotechnical collaboration accordingly.
In our research, “social” refers to the behaviors that take the interests of others
and the common stakeholder characteristics, which influence collaborative team
dynamics during social interactions such as background, objective, and perspec-
tives. he dominant characteristics of design stakeholders (engineer, architect, man-
agers, etc.) tend of be such issues as choice of programming languages, preferred
development methodologies, expectation from project work and design team, and
career goal in the organization. hey are initially brought into the collaborative
teamwork by the participating stakeholders, and then continuously co-constructed
and evolved during the social interaction process. Based on the above meanings,
the term “sociotechnical” signifies the mutual consideration of and the true integra-
tion between the social (teamwork) and technical (task-work) aspects of engineer-
ing activities.
In order to manage the social interaction in the design team, in our research
we also define the “perspective” as the particular attitudes (i.e., viewpoints) via
which the stakeholder views his/her own objectives and others' when making
decisions (e.g., a strong desire for achieving one's own objective, and support-
ing or disagreeing with others' objectives). Furthermore, the conflict needs to
be defined in this work: its general definition is “an argument about something
important or a state of opposition between persons in idea or interests” and spe-
cifically in our research, conflict is defined as the argument between stakehold-
ers about the design tasks, At the root of this argument are the differences in
stakeholders' perspectives on various points of view, based on their understand-
ing of the design task and their estimation regarding the achievements of the
objectives. he conlict is therefore identiied in the design task and to resolve
it in collaborative design requires the explicit modeling and careful analysis of
stakeholder perspectives.
In summary, the above definitions in our research explicitly acknowledge col-
laborative design tasks as a dynamic interface between individual decisions and
group interactions, and as an assimilation of social and technical activities operating
in parallel over different time, space, and discipline scales in an engineering team.
8.3.2 Overview of the Collaborative Negotiation Process
he sociotechnical collaborative negotiation process is the main strength of this
approach. It describes how the stakeholders structure the negotiation arguments
using both social factors (such as stakeholders' objectives and perspectives) and
technical decisions (such as design task proposals) and then carries out the nego-
tiation process in order to reach an agreement. Figure 8.3 to follow illustrates this
integrated approach, which has three inter-related phases.
First, the
pre-negotiationphase
starts with identifying a set of “stakeholders” who
have an interest in the outcome of the co-construction process, in which they will
