Various definitions through literature (text in progress)

• a social process that involves a variety of participants with different skills, responsabilities and interests, who see the object of design differently. participants who do not share the same mental representations of the design, negotiate by managing a design conversation (Buciarelli, 1988)
• a collective sense building where interaction is not the sum of effective work, but reciprocal incentives that contribute to the design task (Achten, 2002)
• a negotiation between different stakeholders who define and redefine the design problem (Rittel, 1973)
• the co-evolution of the problem-solution (Dorst and Cross, 2001)
• two processes: one is to generate a plan for a programme, and the other is to justify the plan in relation to a programme (Tzonis and Oorschot, 1987)

References

Dorta, Th., Lesage, A., Di Bartolo, C., 2012, “Collaboration and Design Education through the Interconnected HIS: Immature vs. Mature CI Loops observed through Ethnography by Telepresence”, eCAADe 30, Vol. 2, pp 97-10

Bay, Joo-Hwa, 2001, ‘Cognitive Biases on Design: The case of tropical architecture’, PhD Dissertation, Technische Universiteit Delft