Effective Ways of Enhancing Communications in Design Process: A Preliminary Study

Abstract

The major task of Industrial Design Department is to accomplish the company’s goal through product creations. Since this is an interdisciplinary task inherently, effective communications with various peer departments are crucial. However, different departments always have conflicting agendas and varied aspect of focuses towards the company’s goal. Thus effective communication between peer departments is a requirement of building consensus, which will enhance cooperation between them to achieve the company’s goal collectively. The aim of this research is to summarize effective ways of communications in product development and design process that industrial design team managers can take as the reference to enhance their design management performances. Since the research project is still going on, this paper will include the preliminary study of this research only. We investigated existing research results and developments on communications and product development comprehensively through literature review. In conclusion, we summarized existing knowledge concerning the topic of communication in product development into a questionnaire, twelve questions was developed in this questionnaire for further in-depth interviews with design managers to elicit more replies of their valuable experiences. We hope that the result of this research could help to enhance communication performance in the industrial design team, which will be beneficial for the companies that they are serving.