Digital collaboration in design education: how online collaborative software changes the practices and places of learning

This article provides a snapshot of the digital collaboration practices in a postgraduate master programme studio, focused on service and interaction design. It presents and discusses research from a student survey focused on evaluating the usefulness of the online collaborative software (OCS) 'Slack' and how it relates to a broader media ecology, which is comprised of contemporary and legacy computer digital technologies, including smartphone applications and email. Affordance theory and the concept of polymedia are combined to account both for the inherent capacities of new communication technologies used in the learning context, and their relational, contingent aspects, which are given shape as part of complex and context-specific communicative practices. In conclusion, it is suggested that there is much potential for further research into how the changing boundaries between everyday life and work - in part a consequence of OCS and mobile computing - are also changing the way students communicate with each other and educators.