Communication In Design Teams Research Articles

Opening the black box: Developing metrics to assess the cognitive processes of prototyping

While past work has demonstrated the ability of prototypes to boost design project performance, influence stakeholder buy-in, and improve design team communication, prototyping remains a ‘black-box’ process. The specific mechanisms through which prototypes affect designer cognition remains unknown. To date, there has been little work to operationalize theory and enable the fine-grain measurement of cognitive processes during prototyping tasks. In short, there is a lack of appropriate metrics to establish the intangible value of prototyping tasks via the measurement of the knowledge generated. The purpose of this work is to propose metrics that more holistically assess the value of prototypes. The proposed metrics are implemented in a design project to validate their utility in studying prototyping tendencies.

Perceived analogical communication in design teams: Development and validation of a scale

Analogies have been shown to play a key role in design collaboration. However, research has been largely limited to the analogy itself and how it is used, overlooking the impact of analogy from the recipients' perspective. This is a critical aspect, considering the imperfect information transfer between members in design teams. We address this gap by developing a measure of perceived analogical communication in teams, focusing on the interpretation of the use of analogy in internal design team communications. We test the resulting scale across 3 samples, totalling 252 multi-disciplinary teams with 1182 team members. Results show that the scale is an internally consistent, distinct construct, and holds predictive validity for relevant design team processes and outcomes.

Clear as a bell

PurposeThis study reviews the construct of analogy as an individual communication mode, examining its relationship with cross-understanding in knowledge-diverse teams. The authors theorize that analogy use enhances team information processing beyond mere communication frequency through bridging knowledge differences across team members. The authors propose that analogies will have a direct relationship to knowledge application, and an indirect effect via cross-understanding. However, communication frequency will have only an indirect effect on knowledge application through cross-understanding.Design/methodology/approachThe authors sampled a 49-member team with 14 subteams, yielding 146 usable dyadic relationships. Two mediation models were estimated while using linear mixed-effect models in SPSS.FindingsThe results confirm the importance of analogies and cross-understanding in teams, generally supporting the hypotheses. Mere communication frequency was not related to knowledge application, indicating that “how you say it” may be more important than how often a team member speaks.Research limitations/implicationsThis research explored these constructs through a three-week project in a sample of graduate students working with a real-world client. Future research could explore the validity of this model in other organizational settings and test the analogy construct on the team level.Practical implicationsThe effectiveness of team member communication should be measured not only as frequency but also in terms of analogies to transmit meaning.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to an understanding of teams as information processors by building empirical support for the utility of analogical communication in design teams, establishing the relationship of analogies to cross-understanding and knowledge application.

Design Team Communication and Design Task Complexity: The Preference for Dialogues

The way in which dialogues and group meetings affect the progress of multidisciplinary architectural design teams can be easily underestimated by managers. This is due to the importance of group meetings to review designs, share information, make decisions and hence progress the design. The aim of this paper is to discuss how design dialogues and design team meetings facilitate team communication. A review of research into design team communication and performance using a project website provides an insight into how design team members used and changed their synchronous and asynchronous communication while adopting the project web. Case studies were used to investigate changes in communication practices affecting team performance due to project web use. Research findings reveal a preference among design team members for dialogue as their favourite communication medium despite the growing use of asynchronous communication by teams. Results are discussed against research findings from communication in design and management team meetings. Implications for design managers, concerned with improving communications and the management of design, are discussed in the light of the research findings.

Exploring effectiveness of team communication

PurposeEffective teams use a balance of synchronous and asynchronous communication. Team communication is dependent on the communication acts of team members and the ability of managers to facilitate, stimulate and motivate them. Team members from organizations using different information systems tend to have different understanding, opinions, and rates of adoption and skills levels regarding specific IT tools. The purpose of this paper is to explore the effective use of tools for communication in design teams and the strategies for the use of specific tools.Design/methodology/approachA review of the potential effectiveness of synchronous and asynchronous communication means and tools for team communication leads to a review of research conducted into the use of two relatively new electronic tools for team communication by design teams in The Netherlands.FindingsThe research results revealed that a collective framework for team communication and collaboration using electronic tools was missing. There was also evidence of a lack of understanding by the users of the proper use of the tools, a lack of training, poor management competences to stimulate proper use. There was also evidence that the rivalry of tools tended to hinder, rather than improve, effectiveness of team communication.Research limitations/implicationsThe findings are limited to the cases investigated; however, they tend to support earlier findings into construction team communication. There is a need for a better collective understanding of team communication, which should be supported with training to develop appropriate skills, both for the use of new technologies and for the use of team rules.Originality/valueThe results provide information and advice for design and project managers concerned with improving communications in design and construction projects.

The latent semantic approach to studying design team communication

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.

Intelligent support for communication in design teams: garment shape specifications in the knitwear industry

Communication between different members of a design team is a notoriously difficult problem, especially at the early stages of the design process. In the knitwear design process, the communication between knitwear designers and technicians has been identified in an empirical study as a major bottleneck. While knitwear is inherently difficult to communicate, the design culture does little ease the problem. This paper argues that an intelligent design support system allows the designers to turn their typically incomplete, inconsistent and inaccurate specification of designs into a correct representation of their ideas, thus reducing the interpretation by technicians as well as the design time. This can be achieved by automatically creating design solution suggestions based on the designers' customary specifications. This principle has been illustrated for the construction of garment shapes, which were modeled mathematically.

Capital costs versus costs-in-use: a content analysis of design team member communication patterns

The verbal interaction of a number of building design teams was observed, recorded and analyzed using content analysis. A pilot and main study design team were observed on a longditudinal basis while a range of validation design teams were observed on a cross sectional basis. Variations in the communication content of individual design team members were recorded and measured in relation to a number of specific interest areas. One interest area was the measurement of the reconciliation between capital costs and expected costs-in-use, as a function of design team communication content in the pre-contract design stages. This paper considers the development of design team communication, particularly conflict development, in relation to the essential incompatibilities between capital cost minimization and cost in use optimization objectives and how this relates to design team development.