Research on group awareness of networked collaboration within the design team and between teams

Abstract

Group awareness is the critical content of collaboration in a networked collaborative design team, and it is a meaningful way to study teamwork efficiency. However, existing methods that describe awareness information are not comprehensive. They all set an ideal collaborative environment of the single role and single activity, ignoring the bidirectional and overlapping of the collaboration process. To meet this gap, a novel group awareness method for the networked collaboration design team is proposed in this paper from the actual collaborative process. Firstly, the awareness information granularity in the joint work of the networked collaborative design team is described in detail, and the group awareness model is established. Then, the intra- and inter-team collaboration of networked collaborative design team is quantified, and correspondingly, combined with the degree of cooperation between members, a method for solving the group awareness ability of intra- and inter-team association by adopting awareness calculation is presented. Last, to illustrate the feasibility of the suggested approach, a vehicle interior collaborative design task is taken as an example. This study can provide practical guidance for a related design service platform to optimize team collaboration efficiency and select team members objectively and fairly.