A habitable space for supporting creative collaboration
The complexity and the increasing scale of design projects require stakeholders from different disciplines to collaborate together. This paper addresses the challenge of bridging communication gaps raised during collaborative design activities, with a meta-design socio-technical approach — namely, design for participation and creative collaboration — leading to an evolutionary process. Based experience derived from a Software Shaping Workshop (SSW), we propose a novel hive mind space (HMS). This model introduces a boundary zone, serving as a communication channel allowing Communities of Practice (CoPs) to create and exchange knowledge. Thus, as opposed to being excluded from the design process, the CoPs can actively participate in the design activity and perform their tasks collaboratively and creatively. We describe the structure of the hive mind space and propose a possible way to implement it into a case study example — the Valchiavenna Museum.