Designing like a joint cognitive system

There’s a famous paper by Gary Klein, Paul Feltovich, and David Woods, called Common Ground and Coordination in Joint Activity. Written in 2004, this paper discusses the challenges a group of people face when trying to achieve a common goal. The authors introduce the concept of common ground, which must be established and maintained by all of the participants in order for them to reach the goal together.

I’ve blogged previously about the concept of common ground, and the associated idea of the basic compact. (You can also watch John Allspaw discuss the paper at Papers We Love). Common ground is typically discussed in the context of high-tempo activities. The most popular example in our field is an ad hoc team of engineers responding to an incident.

The book Designing Engineers was originally published in 1994, ten years before the Common Ground paper, and so Louis Bucciarelli never uses the phrase. And yet, the book calls forward to the ideas of common ground, and applies them to the lower-tempo work of engineering design. Engineering design, Bucciarelli claims, is a social process. While some design work is solitary, much of it takes place in social interactions, from formal meetings to informal hallway conversations.

But Bucciarelli does more than discover the ideas of common ground, he extends them. Klein et al. talk about the importance of an agreed upon set of rules, and the need to establish interpredictability: for participants to communicate to each other what they’re going to do next. Bucciarelli talks about how engineering design work involves actually developing the rules, making constraints concrete that were initially uncertain. Instead of interpredictability, Bucciarelli talks about how engineers argue for specific interpretations of requirements based on their own interests. Put simply, where Klein et al., talk about establishing, sustaining, and repairing common ground, Bucciarelli talks about constructing, interpreting, and negotiating the design.

Bucciarelli’s book is fascinating because he reveals how messy and uncertain engineering work is, and how concepts that we may think of as fixed and explicit are actually plastic and ambiguous.

For example, we think of building codes as being precise, but when applied to new situations, they are ambiguous, and the engineers must make a judgment about how to apply them. Bucciarelli tells an anecdote about the design of an an array of solar cells to mount on a roof. The building codes put limits on how much weight a roof can support, but the code only discusses distributed loads, and one of the proposed designs is based on four legs, which would be a concentrated load. An engineer and an architect negotiate on the type of design for the mounting: the engineer favors a solution that’s easier for the engineering company, but more work for the architect. The architect favors a solution that is more work and expense for the engineering company. The two must negotiate to reach an agreement on the design, and the relevant building code must be interpreted in this context.

Bucciarelli also observes that the performance requirements given to engineers are much less precise than you would expect, and so the engineers must construct more precise requirements as part of the design work. He gives the example of a company designing a cargo x-ray system for detecting contraband. The requirement is that it should be able to detect “ten pounds of explosive”. As the engineers prepare to test their prototype, a discussion ensues: what is an explosive? Is it a device with wires? A bag of plastic? The engineers must define what an explosive means, and that definition becomes a performance requirement.

Even technical terms that sound well-defined are ambiguous, and may be interpreted differently by different members of the engineering design team. The author witnesses a discussion of “module voltage” for a solar power generator. But the term can refer to open circuit voltage, maximum power voltage, operating voltage, or nominal voltage. It is only through social interactions that this ambiguity is resolved.

What Bucciarelli also notices in his study of engineers is that they do not themselves recognize the messy, social nature of design: they don’t see the work that they do establishing common ground as the design work. I mentioned this in a previous blog post. And that’s really a shame. Because if we don’t recognize these social interactions as design work, we won’t invest in making them better. To borrow a phrase from cognitive systems engineering, we should treat design work as work that’s done by a joint cognitive system.