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Cross-functional teams that include members from different knowledge domains often struggle to align their work across disciplines (Barley et al., 2020; Woo et al., 2021). Due to differences in their discipline specific languages, interpretations and jargons, cross-functional team members' communication can be complex, ambiguous and difficult to interpret and transfer (Carlile, 2002). Consequently, researchers from different fields such as communication, engineering, construction and management promote the use of visualization tools (e.g. PowerPoint, Computer Aided Design/Manufacturing (CAD/CAM), Visual Studio's Class Designer) to support cross-disciplinary communication (Cherubini et al., 2007; Dossick and Neff, 2011; Kaplan, 2010; Whyte et al., 2016).
An established body of literature (Dossick and Neff, 2011; Cherubini et al., 2007; Whyte et al., 2016) suggests that these design tools aid in developing visualizations (e.g. printed documents, charts, or 3D models) that have the potential to serve as boundary objects—artifacts that have the capacity to support interdisciplinary collaborations due to their interpretive flexibility (Carlile, 2002; Nicolini et al., 2012). Essentially, these visualizations carry and communicate multiple meanings that can be unpacked collaboratively and shared across disciplines through emergent interactions among team members (Bechky, 2003; Dossick and Neff, 2011; Ewenstein and Whyte, 2007).
While the role of visualizations as boundary objects that support knowledge sharing among interdisciplinary team members has been extensively studied, the specific communicative processes through which members interact with each other and the visualizations to create shared knowledge remain underexplored (Mariano and Awazu, 2017). For instance, Bechky (2003), among others (e.g. Ewenstein and Whyte, 2007; Nicolini et al., 2012), explains how boundary objects support knowledge integration but call for future researchers and practitioners to focus on promoting the specific communicative interactions that allow for such knowledge integration.
This shift in focus on the communicative process that enables interdisciplinary knowledge sharing may allow researchers to study a form of knowing that Rennstam and Ashcraft (2014) call communicative knowledge, which is “a distinct form of knowing, accomplished and ‘housed’ in interaction, but that is also about interactions, about how to interact persuasively and effectively within the frame of one's practice” (p. 10). Primarily, this implies that whether domain experts can coordinate across knowledge boundaries—a sticky problem that persists in knowledge-based industries (Barley et al.,...