New design strategies: Using the Hive Mind Space model to enhance collaboration

As collaboration in creating information systems becomes more frequent and more important among multi-disciplinary teams, finding new models for coordinating this collaboration becomes crucial. Supporting end users' collaborative design, therefore, calls for a new design strategy. 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. This model provides an integrated habitable space bringing diverse Communities of Practice (CoPs) together to actively participate in the design activities and to collaboratively solve design problems.The model highlights a boundary zone, serving as a common meeting space supporting communication and message exchange among CoPs. The emphasis on exchanging and creating boundary objects within the boundary zone provides a means to overcome the communication gaps among CoPs. The paper describes the overall structure of the HMS exploits the affordances of a Hive Mind Space (HMS) and depicts the flow of reasoning used in applying it on a real development case in factory automation domain.