Architects in interdisciplinary contexts: Representational practices in healthcare design

• We observe experts who collaborate to develop a hospital design.
• In healthcare design practice, there is a growing demand for interdisciplinary expertise.
• Architects hold on to their expert position by employing strategic representations.
• Design representations are critical in cultivating interdisciplinary expertise.

This paper reports a study of a multi-disciplinary design team operating in a sophisticated socio-cognitive and material environment. Following an ethnographic approach we aimed at understanding the nature of the complex interactions within the team, and, specifically, the role of designers in interdisciplinary contexts as they engage with other experts. The focus was on a series of key practices in adapting, developing, and translating knowledge that emerged through the interactions of experts with different disciplinary backgrounds. It was observed that while all engaging parties offered their resources to contribute to the developing design work, the exchanges around design representations developed by the architects allowed the distributed disciplinary expertise to morph into a new form of interdisciplinary expertise to solve problems in-situ.