Junior designers may experience struggles with collaborative partners (e.g clients, managers, and stakeholders) who may prioritise values differently and which may yield frustration, conflict, and stress. Particularly, junior designers may find coping with value-based conflicts challenging as support is lacking. Senior designers can develop effective ways of coping to promptly reduce frustration. Design schools and professional development courses could offer support to address and facilitate learning from valuebased conflicts. This study aims to answer the following question: how can junior designers cope more effectively with value-based conflicts in collaborative design practice? @en

This article explores how junior design professionals cope with value-based conflicts. We interviewed 22 design professionals about past and current value-based conflicts and the coping strategies adopted. Applying a grounded theory approach, we identified 11 types of coping strategies employed by junior design professionals. Our findings allowed us to clarify the nature of the coping process and localise value-based conflicts in the process of collaborative practice. During the coping process, professionals learn how to handle value-based conflicts through emotional release, developing a broader action repertoire, and engaging in timely action. We also identified transitions between specific coping strategies as junior designers learned from past conflicts and developed as a professional.

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Junior design professionals experience conflicts in collaboration with others, with value differences being one of the issues influen-cing such conflicts. In a retrospective interview study with 22 design professionals, we collected 32 cases of perceived conflicts. We used a grounded theory approach to analyse these cases, resulting in five conflict categories that group 24 distinct value differences arising in 10 critical moments, an event that causes the value-based conflict. Thus, value differences are underlying the perceived conflicts of junior design professionals on many different occasions during collaboration with others. Conclusions are drawn on setting up guidelines for addressing values in co-design practices and sup-porting junior designers in their professional development.@en

Junior designers are not trained to cope with critical situations and conflict at work. Most design schools do not educate their design students to prepare them for (potential) conflict. As a result, junior designers often do not have conflict-handling skills to handle critical situations and conflicts. While some tools and methods exist to help them make responsible design choices, these often address value differences underlying (potential) conflict without taking the perspective of the designer, and thus without supporting young designers to start by reflecting on their own intrinsic values. The aim of this study is to find a way to help junior designers to reflect effectively on critical situations, thereby improving their conflict-handling skills. Data was collected through four steps in an action research. Researchers collaborated with an identity programme for junior design professionals. Insights from try-outs and small interventions were transferred into design requirements for an approach to educate and facilitate junior design professionals to reflect more effectively on critical situations.

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