Learning Across Sites: New tools, infrastructures and practices - Earli

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50 Y. Engeström and H. Toiviainen
the technological language was not rich enough to bring a solution to the design
contradiction.
An investigation of the first months of the design process shows that the participants’
voices seldom represented one of the three social languages in a pure
form. While one of the languages may have dominated in any given episode, the
participants were rather fluidly and subtly moving across the three languages. On
the other hand, this movement and mixing of social languages involved tensions
and conflicts that often found their expression in doubts and hesitations. Is the
blending of the social languages typical throughout the process or will they have
to polarize in order to contribute to expansive object construction The problems
of the language of technology in the third episode analyzed above suggest a need
for the consolidation of the technology. The social languages may have to diverge
again and participate in conscious negotiation on a shared hybrid language, to
make the creation of a shared object possible.
Conclusion
We argue that collaborative design is a process of cognition and learning that
orients itself toward the construction of an object. The creation of a new object
involves multiple social languages and is riddled with contradictions, something
that is typically not captured by micro- analyses of collaborative moments.
To deal with such a movement, participants need meta- tools that mediate and
facilitate the identification and acknowledgment of contradictions and potential
solutions. We anticipate that the design contradiction discussed above will become
even more compelling and complex later on in the project as the end users step
more directly into the collaborative design. In the data analyzed for this chapter,
the social language of development remained conspicuously weak.
Our first conclusion is that collaborative design is a learning process that is actualized
in the construction of the object of collaboration. It is a long process without
shortcuts or straightforward adoption of easy, ready- made technical solutions. In
this case, the emerging object of design was a new learning instrumentality. Without
constant questioning, reopening, and redefining of the object, collaborative design
and learning easily become processes for their own sake – perhaps interesting but
hardly productive.
Second, the object of design is in itself contradictory. In the case analyzed in this
chapter, the inner contradiction of the object manifested itself above all as a tension
between the existing tools and new innovative ideas that defined the core of the
design. One could argue, as is often heard, that creativity is in the combination of
existing tools in a new context. However, such a combination is a contradictory
issue that cannot be accomplished without the creation of new intermediate tools
and hybrid social languages.
Third, the contradictory object is worked out through multi- voiced dialogue. To
master this, participants need to learn to identify and recognize the characteristics of
their social languages and to take advantage of their complementarity. In practice,