The Influence of Physicality and Remote Collaboration in Moments of Design Convergence

The COVD-19 pandemic forced the world into a natural experiment, one that brings into sharp relief the potential and the limitations of our economy’s capacity to support remote collaboration. While the implications of remote work ripple out across an infinite array of economic and social contexts, this study aims to better understand a basic question: How does remote collaboration impact the process of designing and developing physical products? To explore this question, we combined a bibliographic review with qualitative field research that included conducting interviews with working design professionals—all of whom specialized in physical products of some kind—followed by a survey to expand on and validate interview findings. The driving goal of this investigation was not to determine whether remote collaboration can be applied in the context of physical product design and development, but rather to understand what aspects of the design process are hindered most when collaborators are not co-located. The results of this study supported the idea that the current state of remote collaboration hinders the speed of the design process, namely due to technical constraints of commonly available remote collaboration tools. Across the board, interview participants and survey respondents reported that these tools are limited in their ability to support aspects of the design process that are both rooted in the physical world and require some act of collaborative decision making. Beyond these more tactical elements of the design process, however, this study also identified how remote collaboration impacts organizational dynamics of design teams—i.e. remote collaboration demands a greater level of administrative work on the part of team leaders and creates a sense of isolation and lack of access to management for more junior members of design teams. As more companies consider the role of remote collaboration in the future of work, this study serves as a resource for understanding key pain-points design teams face while working on physical products in a remote setting, and articulates why moments of design convergence are of particular consequence. It then provides a set of key takeaways to inform how design teams might adapt their collaborative practices to better address these pain-points and support remote design teams in the short and long term.S.M