Thinking in design teams - an analysis of team communication

Mental models play a decisive role when it comes to cooperate and coordinate team activities in complex environments and contexts. However, scientific knowledge about the coordination of mental models in heterogeneous groups, and even more across different disciplines, has not yield much progress in the last decades. Mental models affect design activities on content and process levels. These have consequences for the different phases in the design process, from the first moment of defining the problem till the final decision for detail design. The present paper focuses on the comparison of two different design disciplines, and analyzes how problems demanding creativity are approached. Two meetings of engineering and architectural teams solving a complex domain-specific design problem in the very early stage of idea generation were studied. Utterances of the transcripts from both team sessions have been explored based on the categorisation system developed explicitly for the analysis of group behaviour in complex environments. Qualitative and quantitative analyses are presented, from which conclusions about the differences in design problem solving processes of design teams with different disciplinary backgrounds are offered.

CoDesign, 2007

This article provides an overview of research into mental models in teams and discusses the relevance of this theoretical concept for design teams. Researchers in several disciplines have applied the construct of mental models to understand how people perform tasks based on their knowledge, experience and expectation. The notion has also been used to study teams and to analyse the relationship between team mental model and team performance. Five different types of mental models for studying design teams are proposed: task, process, team, competence, and context. A review the literature found only very few studies on team mental models in design-related areas. A brief overview is provided on what is known about team mental models in general, on the effect of team mental models on team performance, and on what kind of results can be transferred to design teams. A short review of measurement techniques and how they can be applied to design research is presented. Finally, implications for the field of design are discussed and a methodological framework for studying mental models in design teams is proposed.

2007

In this paper, authors tackle three very important questions that need to be answered if a theory of design is to be constructed. The first is what designers do, Which we attempt to illustrate with the help of case studies and theories of design practice. The second question is what guides designers. Here, authors try to present some of the proposed normative positions about design, to show the similarities and differences between positions and a framework of how they can be categorized. The main (third) question is how the design thinking process can be represented drawing upon on a review of recent studies of design practice and designer's creativity. One approach to design thinking is to extract the features of the designers' strategic knowledge, for which comparative studies between expert designers and novices are useful. Also, controlled experimental studies may be adopted in order to understand the nature of the idea generation process. Finally, the methods of researc...

Understanding how designers think is core to advancing design methods, tools, and outcomes. Engineering researchers have effectively turned to cognitive science approaches to studying the engineering design process. Empirical methods used for studying designer thinking have included verbal protocols, case studies, and controlled experiments. Studies have looked at the role of design methods, strategies, tools, environment, experience, and group dynamics. Early empirical studies were casual and exploratory with loosely defined objectives and informal analysis methods. Current studies have become more formal, factor controlled, aiming at hypothesis testing, using statistical design of experiments (DOE) and analysis methods such as analysis of variations (ANOVA). Popular pursuits include comparison of experts and novices, identifying and overcoming fixation, role of analogies, effectiveness of ideation methods, and other various tools. This paper first reviews a snapshot of the different approaches to study designers and their processes. Once the current basis is established, the paper explores directions for future or expanded research in this rich and critical area of designer thinking. A variety of data may be collected, and related to both the process and the outcome (designs). But there are still no standards for designing, collecting and analyzing data, partly due to the lack of cognitive models and theories of designer thinking. Data analysis is tedious and the rate of discoveries has been slow. Future studies may need to develop computer based data collection and automated analyses, which may facilitate collection of massive amounts of data with the potential of rapid advancement of the rate of discoveries and development of designer thinking cognitive models. The purpose of this paper is to provide a roadmap to the vast literature for the benefit of new researchers, and also a retrospective for the community.

Journal of Engineering Design, 2004

Designers usually work with drawings, especially in the form of sketching, and with very rudimentary objects or models. However, creative problem-solving methodology is predominantly based on sentential, written or spoken, means of expression. Taking one of the best known and most widely used creative methods, brainstorming, as our starting point, we have developed three variants, each of which highlights one of the three forms of expression used in design groups: sentential, visual and objectual (with pieces or rudimentary objects). The effectiveness of the design process according to the means of expression was analysed using the transcription of the protocols. To carry out the evaluation we studied the extent to which the ideas fulfilled the requirements, and the linkography technique was adapted so as to be able to analyse the links between ideas. In all cases the results were validated statistically by repeating the experiment under controlled conditions. A wide range of ideas is produced with sentential brainstorming, although not all of them meet the requirements of the problem. With the objectual variant, fewer ideas are obtained but these have a higher level of resolution and are better suited to the fulfilment of the requirements of the problem. The visual variant is an alternative lying between the other two.

Research in Engineering Design, 2019

The purpose of the study is to model the micro-scale process patterns which can be identified during team conceptual design activities. A state-transition model has been developed and used to empirically investigate the patterns of design operations during two types of team conceptual design activities: ideation and concept review. The presented work builds on the perception of design problems as ill-defined and implies that conceptual design activities involve the simultaneous development of problems and solutions using three distinctive design operations—analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. The three design operations have been defined as fine-grain design steps performed by design teams when exploring the content of both the problem and the solution dimensions of the design space. Moreover, design operations have been conceptualised as transitions between states of the explored design space, thus providing a basis for the state-transition model. The model’s ability to map and visualise proportions of design operation sequences emerging during ideation and concept review has facilitated the identification of both the activity-specific patterns and patterns that were likely to appear during both types of empirically investigated activities. The two activities exhibited similar patterns, such as alternation of solution synthesis and analysis, sequences of synthesis, analysis and evaluation within solution space, and the potential co-evolution episodes. Nevertheless, divergent traits have been identified for ideation, and convergent traits for concept review, based on the significant differences in proportions of design operations and their sequences.

In this paper, the authors describe how the design thinking process can be represented drawing upon on a review of recent studies of design practice and designer creativity. The representation of creative design and how the resulting models can be applied to the design of computer support systems and to design education are discussed significant research, which has represented design thinking, was examined. One approach to design thinking is to extract the features of the designers' strategic knowledge, for which comparative studies between expert designers and novices are useful. Also, controlled experimental studies may be adopted in order to understand the nature of the idea generation process. Candy ™s model of the technologists' contribution to human creativity is intended to assist the design of computer supported creativity. Another important research area is focused on time lines in the design thinking process and Lawson has described such processes in terms of par...

2008

Creativity is a construct with many different facets and various theoretical interlinks to other psychological concepts such as flexibility or fixation (Cardoso and Badke-Schaub, 2011). Hence, there are different approaches to assess, understand and teach creativity in design. This chapter focuses on the role of team mental models in design and discusses the relevance of team sharedness in the process of designing in teams. Departing from theoretical considerations and integrating empirical data, a framework is presented that allows conceptualizing social and cognitive aspects of design problem solving in teams is presented. A major emphasis is set on the relationship between team collaboration, sharedness of mental models, and design creativity. Despite the fact that sharedness of team mental models is considered to play an important role in teams’ performance, it is not yet known when, under which circumstances, and what degree the sharedness of design teams’ mental models lead to a creative result. For example, visual representations are shown to be powerful processes contributing to gaining shared understanding. Recommendations for supporting sharedness in creative design are suggested for practitioners and educators.

Decision making in design requires careful consideration, as any inaccuracies or faults can have serious consequences for the producer, the user and/or the competitiveness of the company. Research investigating decision making in design so far has mainly focused on the selection of decisions as part of technical choices and classical optimisation problems. In recent years, further research has been started to discover the characteristics of successful decision making in industry. These later, mostly single case studies shed light on some general influences on decision making but so far have not identified different relevant patterns of decision-making processes in design teams which are influential on the result and the process of decision making, such as the constituents of rejected decisions. The research study reported here was initiated to further analyse the components of decision-making processes in teams, with special emphasis on the question of how decisions develop during the design process. For example, what happens to rejected decisions in the course of the design process? The observed processes should be analysed in detail by assessing all utterances in an interaction protocol which can be used as indicators of underlying cognitive processes in decision making; this research approach is usually called protocol analysis. In this experimental study using protocol analysis, rejected decisions were compared against those that were chosen to be used in designing the final outcome. The findings show how the designers develop the solution space and illustrate the analysis of decisions as a promising approach to analyse both the individual cognitive process and the contribution of the individual to the decision-making process in design teams. Keywords:design process; teamwork; decision making; protocol analysis