In their Point , Wenzel, Cabantous, and Koch set out how future making encompasses a broad range of future‐oriented practices, including but not limited to planning, foresight, agile, and design‐driven approaches. In this Counterpoint , we contest that viewing future making as any future‐oriented practice may also encompass unsuitable and detrimental practices, and may blur the concept to the point of hindering, rather than sustaining efforts at theorizing future making. Adopting a Pragmatist perspective, we suggest viewing future making as an emancipatory inquiry aimed at imagining and reifying desirable futures, that is, collective, value‐based judgements of what the future might and should be. This entails a reflective conversation with the social and material world, whereby concerned actors collectively deliberate, based on values, what futures are desirable – for themselves, for future generations, and the natural environment. In advancing this view, we also reject Wright's Counterpoint on future making as a management fad that ignores long‐standing research on scenario planning, and instead, we argue that future making should depart from the managerialism of scenario planning. The main contribution of our Counterpoint is to suggest a theoretical perspective for advancing our understanding of how desirable futures can be crafted in practice.

The question of how project leadership can achieve desirable futures through projects is timely and important, yet under-explored. We synthesize recent insights on future making and socialized project leadership to address it. Our contribution is to frame project leadership for future making as the set-up and maintenance of organizational contexts for participation in collective practices of inquiry to identify desirable futures and achieve project outcomes. We argue that throughout the project life cycle, participants engage with incomplete representations of possible futures, and ask questions that identify and include diverse people, materials, and places to make ethical judgments for better futures.

Although Chinese designers are gaining international recognition, design research (the study of design and designing) is still informed by a predominantly Western perspective. In this paper, we explore how taking into consideration the Chinese perspective can advance design research, by challenging and expanding prevailing understandings of design and designing. We first uncover the Chinese perspective, by tracing the emergence of modern design in China, discussing the meaning of the Chinese word for design, she ji (sic), and elaborating some important aspects of the Chinese traditional culture (harmony, holism, and change) that influence Chinese design practices. We then argue how this Chinese perspective can foster connections between diverse paradigms of design research, counter the tendency toward reductionism in design research, and encourage experimentation in design research methods. This paper contributes to advance design research through inclusion of the Chinese perspective. By so doing, it also sustains the agenda of decolonizing design research.

Online organizing is situated in offline practices. Recent theorizing has examined how online and offline practices co-evolve over time, but given limited attention to how they co-exist in time. Yet, without being ‘here’ in an embodied material practice, we cannot experience being ‘there’ online. Understanding the co-existence of online and offline practices is important as organizing becomes actively negotiated in the moments of being simultaneously here offline and there online. In this article, we pull the field of view back from the computer screen to theorize the simultaneity of online organizing with multiple offline practices in which participants are embodied and engage materially. We articulate how, in the case of the video conference, the shared experience of presence, proximity and participation in online organizing is constituted in relation to multiple – but mostly unshared – offline practices. We argue that this interconnection with multiple offline practices can blur boundaries, divert purposes and lead to glitches and breakdowns in online organizing. We make two contributions. First, we recast online organizing as embedded in multiple, mostly unshared, offline practices. Second, we develop understanding of the co-existence of online and offline in time, and its implications for interacting and organizing online. We conclude by suggesting new directions for research on organizing across simultaneously co-existing online and offline practices.

Future making is the work of making sense of possible and probable futures, and evaluating, negotiating and giving form to preferred ones. Practices of making futures are increasingly online. Yet, as organizational participants come together online – organizing remotely to make offline futures – they lack the shared experiential knowledge that is gained through embodied and situated practices. In this essay, we argue that the lack of experiential knowledge makes future making online difficult to organize and vulnerable to excluding relevant expertise; dialogue may become inward-looking and self-referential within the online environment, with an emotional and cognitive distance from the futures being made outside of such representations. We draw on the pragmatist tradition to theorize online future making, to articulate its dynamics and the challenges that arise, and to suggest remedial actions. By conceptualizing future making as a form of inquiry – as a distributed and reflective process that proceeds through engagement with representations of the future – we identify three remedial actions for online future making: to solicit feedback, juxtapose alternatives and change medium. These remedial actions seek to compensate for the lack of shared experiential knowledge by both sustaining the online involvement of heterogeneous remote participants and by bringing in relevant (offline) places, people and materials to online future making.

Previous research on knowledge work has started to explore how organizational actors deal with pragmatic boundaries that arise from their different interests, priorities, and viewpoints. Material objects, such as visual artifacts, can be used to shape and manipulate pragmatic boundaries, but our understanding of these dynamics is only partial. In this paper, we maintain that focusing on the uses of visual artifacts offers an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the political aspects of knowledge work. To this end, we conducted a practice-based study of an architectural project in which the building design became contested. Our empirical analysis reveals four practices in which visual artifacts are used to deal with pragmatic boundaries: surfacing, bridging, preventing, and minimizing. Through these practices, organizational actors can make boundaries more or less visible with important implications on their power relations and the project at hand. The main contribution of our study is to advance understanding of the political dynamics in knowledge work by revealing how visual artifacts can be used to manipulate pragmatic boundaries. By so doing, our analysis also helps to move the conversation on visual artifacts beyond their role as epistemic objects that sustain (or hinder) knowledge work.

We introduce a method in which instant data visualization facilitates real-time data integration and involves participants in data interpretation. The results of quantitative research (e.g., electronic card sorting) are represented visually (e.g., in a dendrogram) and fed back to research participants in follow-up focus group conversations. The visualized quantitative results are reviewed and discussed by participants. The visual display of the quantitative results is annotated with qualitative feedback generated by participants that explains, enriches, or challenges the quantitative results. We apply our method in a card sorting study of Fédération Internationale de Football Association’s (FIFA) stakeholders. An approach that facilitates real-time data integration that is participant driven and visually supported is the unique contribution of this article to mixed methods research.

The buildup of shared understanding is central to design work. It is particularly important in remote teams, where design work is carried out by participants scattered across geographical locations. We contribute by exploring designers’ perceptions of shared understanding in remote teams. Taking the perspective of individual designers working in remote teams, we pursue two aims: first, to uncover the work elements that are perceived as requiring shared understanding, and second, to identify the perceived enablers of and barriers to the buildup of shared understanding. Albeit under-researched, such individual perceptions are important because they likely shape the scope and extent of the shared understanding built in the remote team. To pursue our aims, we conducted in-depth interviews with experienced designers. Using thematic analysis, we found that team spirit, shared experience, trustworthiness, and transparency, as well as project management and related micro-practices, are perceived as central to building shared understanding in remote design teams.

The design process requires coordination between professions that have different ways of seeing. Using ethnographic data from a building project, this paper explores how architects and engineers mobilize visual objects to coordinate their professional visions around a design issue. The findings articulate the visual practices whereby design professionals move from a fragmented towards a shared professional vision. In this move, they cease looking at the design issue from within their disciplinary perspective, and begin taking inspiration from each other's. They further adjust the emergent shared professional vision, by iteratively narrowing and broadening its focus. The paper contributes to the practice perspective in design studies, explaining how different ways of seeing are coordinated through practical engagement with visual objects. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

In this paper we introduce an information system and a research method that use disagreement in order to provide value adding insights relevant for research and work practice. The system includes an innovative electronic survey platform which reports and visualizes disagreement in survey results. Based on an index of disagreement algorithm, survey results are automatically aggregated into visualizations. Survey questions are displayed in descending order, with the questions that have received the most discrepant answers being placed on top. The researcher shows the visualizations to the survey participants in follow-up group conversations (dissent conversations) and uses the visualizations as focal points to guide the conversations. The visual display of disagreement spurs an exchange of interpretations and insights. Based on a study with 57 managers, we show that applying our system and method enables researchers and research participants to jointly produce interpretations that enrich survey results and revise correlational models. The system and the method introduced in this paper contribute toward improving collaborative thinking in groups by unpacking the reasons for disagreement, revealing unpopular truths and individual motivations and perceptions, and leveraging on cognitive diversity in knowledge creation.

In this paper we describe an inventory of visual interaction patterns - repeatable combinations of visualizations and accompanying questions aimed at extending quantitative studies with qualitative data. More precisely, a visual interaction pattern is a systematic approach by which quantitative research results are visualized, shown to the research participants and interpreted together with the research participants. After a quantitative research phase (like a survey, experiment or card sorting), we produce visualizations (bar charts, matrices, etc.) which display the quantitative results. We then show these visualizations to our research participants in follow-up group conversations and ask questions in order to spur an exchange of interpretations and insights. We involve our research participants in the data interpretation process. We use the visualizations as centers around which we facilitate the group conversations by referring to what the visualizations are "saying" and asking what this means in the eyes of our research participants. The visual interaction patterns are elicitation mechanisms which enable researchers and research participants to jointly produce value-adding research insights. For example, the disagreement pattern provides value-adding insights by visualizing the spread of opinions and using constructive conflict as a way of collective thinking. The outlier pattern visualizes extreme dissenting views and gives voice to them. The benefits of applying the patterns include improving the correspondence of correlational models with empirical data, providing explanations for unexpected findings and alternative explanations for expected findings, enabling the formulation of post-hoc hypotheses based on the newly-discovered correlational dependencies, and providing feedback on the research procedure. The involvement of research participants in the data interpretation process enables a critical appraisal and enrichment of quantitative results. Insights extending (or challenging) the quantitative results are gathered, which leads to confirmed, revised or extended correlational models and revised or extended research procedures. These value-adding research outcomes are important for management research because they contribute to theory development, they create ideas on how to solve work-related problems, identify industry-specific dependent and independent variables, or foresee future management trends and developments.

Purpose The use of visual templates has proven instrumental in supporting group meetings. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether visual templates enable culturally diverse groups to achieve greater task precision in face-to-face meetings. Design/methodology/approach Building on Adaptive Structuration Theory, it is argued that visual templates provide structuration for face-to-face meetings, even more so when they are embedded in computer-supported collaborative systems. In particular, it is hypothesized that the higher the degree of structuration imposed by visual templates, the higher the degree of task precision will be. It is also hypothesized that this relationship is positively moderated by group cultural diversity: higher cultural diversity will further sustain the positive effects of visual templates that provide higher structuration. Findings Results of an experiment with 229 managers from 49 countries confirm that facilitating groups with visual templates embedded in a computer-supported collaborative system significantly increases task precision at high levels of cultural diversity. Research limitations/implications This study contributes to Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) by investigating the use of visual templates as a contingency factor that increases performance – specifically task precision – of co-located, culturally diverse groups. Practical implications Results indicate that visual templates embedded in a computer-supported collaborative system are an effective method for increasing task precision in face-to-face meetings of culturally diverse groups. Originality/value Theories from information systems and visualization are integrated into cross-cultural management with a view to sustaining the effectiveness of culturally diverse groups. The study sample is characterized by highly culturally diverse groups interacting in face-to-face meetings.

Current research on strategizing and organizing has explored how practitioners make sense of an uncertain future, but provides limited explanations of how they actually make a realizable course of action for the future. A focus on making rather than sensemaking brings into view the visual artefacts that practitioners use in giving form to what is ‘not yet’ – drawings, models and sketches. We explore how visual artefacts are used in making a realizable course of action, by analysing ethnographic data from an architectural studio designing a development strategy for their client. We document how visual artefacts become enrolled in practices of imagining, testing, stabilizing and reifying, through which abstract imaginings of the future are turned into a realizable course of action. We then elaborate on higher-order findings that are generalizable to a wide range of organizational settings, and discuss their implications for future research in strategizing and organizing. This paper contributes in two ways: first, it offers future making as an alternative perspective on how practitioners orient themselves towards the future (different from current perspectives such as foreseeing, future perfect thinking and wayfinding). Second, it advances our understanding of visual artefacts and their performativity in the making of organizational futures.

Purpose The use of visual templates has proven instrumental in supporting group meetings. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether visual templates enable culturally diverse groups to achieve greater task precision in face-to-face meetings. Design/methodology/approach Building on Adaptive Structuration Theory, it is argued that visual templates provide structuration for face-to-face meetings, even more so when they are embedded in computer-supported collaborative systems. In particular, it is hypothesized that the higher the degree of structuration imposed by visual templates, the higher the degree of task precision will be. It is also hypothesized that this relationship is positively moderated by group cultural diversity: higher cultural diversity will further sustain the positive effects of visual templates that provide higher structuration. Findings Results of an experiment with 229 managers from 49 countries confirm that facilitating groups with visual templates embedded in a computer-supported collaborative system significantly increases task precision at high levels of cultural diversity. Research limitations/implications This study contributes to Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) by investigating the use of visual templates as a contingency factor that increases performance – specifically task precision – of co-located, culturally diverse groups. Practical implications Results indicate that visual templates embedded in a computer-supported collaborative system are an effective method for increasing task precision in face-to-face meetings of culturally diverse groups. Originality/value Theories from information systems and visualization are integrated into cross-cultural management with a view to sustaining the effectiveness of culturally diverse groups. The study sample is characterized by highly culturally diverse groups interacting in face-to-face meetings.

ABSTRACTProject-based design involves a variety of visual representations, which are evolved to make decisions and accomplish project objectives. Yet, such mediated and distributed ways of working are difficult to capture through ethnographies that examine situated design. A novel approach is developed that follows cascades of visual representations, and this is illustrated through two empirical studies. In the first case, Heathrow Terminal 5, analysis starts from paper- and model-work used to develop design, tracing connections forward to an assembly manual that forms a ‘consolidated cascade’ of visual representations. In the second, the Turning Torso, Malmo, analysis starts from a planning document, tracing connections backward to the paper- and model-work done to produce this consolidated cascade. This work makes a twofold contribution: first, it offers a methodological approach that supplements ethnographies of situated design. This allows the researcher to be nimble, tracing connections across comple...