DESIGN CHARETTE 3: Jargon

While we were all aiming for the same overall outcome, we often found (to out honest surprise) that we’d come across very fundamental differences such as simply using different terminology for the same thing, as Yen Trinh (accessed October 30, 2012) pointed out happens. It was hard to have conversations sometimes because we were all on the same page but we didn’t realise we were due to the jargon we were using. One major notable incident was when, a week or so before D2 was due, Steve and I were talking about coming to a design freeze soon. This simply meant we stick to our design mainly as we have it now and only make minor necessary changes before the presentation so there is time to do the presentation. The other disciplines freaked out and thought we meant something a lot more final and full on than we meant. There was a general freakout for a little while until we were able to explain what we meant by design freeze. The other disciplines had the same concept but they didn’t have a word for it so they weren’t aware it was a ‘thing’. They just thought it was a general idea.

Similarly, when the architects used words like ‘tectonics’, ‘cladding’ and ‘framing’ we as industrial students didn’t understand what they were talking about  as these weren’t things we’d had to know in the past. We found that Lisa was able to keep up with us mostly on tacit design knowledge and she was able to find a way of clearly communicating with all of us which stemmed from her project management knowledge. She was able to identify when we were getting confused and get the other discipline to explain it in layman’s terms.