The latent semantic approach to studying design team communication

Abstract

How does a team of designers come to construct knowledge about the artefact that they're designing? This question is the subject of intensive research on human behaviour in design employing methods including cognitive and psychometric evaluations and ethno methodological observations. Language-based communication has been argued to play a principal role although the structuring of communication as scaffolds for knowledge construction has never been measured directly. This article puts forth a method for studying design team communication that enables the direct measurement of knowledge construction. Latent semantic analysis (LSA) of language-based communication such as design documentation corpora and verbal communication reveals, from the local co-occurrence of vocabulary, coherence of thought and the formation of a socially held representation of the designed artefact. The results lead to the hypothesis that the similarity of language use bridges indirect relations among components of knowledge stored in each designer's mind, leading to a constructed shared mental representation of the designed artefact.