Analyzing the Co-design Process by Engineers and Product Designers from Perspectives of Knowledge Building

Abstract

This study examines the design activities of engineers and product designers from the perspective of knowledge building. The practice of knowledge building has been studied for more than 30 years. However, in recent years, analytical methods have been developed to analyze it from two directions—idea improvement and epistemic frames—and these methods are currently being enhanced. Nevertheless, studies that have analyzed idea improvement and epistemic frames have focused on practices in the classroom rather than discussing the activities of engineers and designers, who are also knowledge building models. Therefore, this study analyzed the co-design process of a product design team and an engineering team that engaged in creative activities for their work from the perspectives of idea improvement using socio-semantic network analysis (SSNA) and the epistemic frame by epistemic network analysis (ENA). Moreover, this study discussed defining meaning segments using SSNA as a computational approach for quantitative ethnography (QE). As a result, both teams showed good knowledge building characteristics in that they continuously improved their ideas. Furthermore, the engineering team worked under various epistemic actions, while the product designers worked under a limited epistemic frame. We also confirmed that the analysis method of this study was able to extract the characteristic discourse of each team. These results support future knowledge building practices, as they illustrate that designers and engineers engage in the same continuous idea improvement under different epistemic actions. Furthermore, this study contributes to future QE research because the results show the qualitative differences between designers and engineers using determining meaning segments as a computational approach.