scholarly journals Exploring the Influence of Cultural Diversity in Collaborative Design Teams: Preliminary Findings

Author(s):  
Vivian Hsueh-Hua Chen ◽  
Henry Been-Lirn Duh
Author(s):  
Ralph O. Buchal

 Abstract – Many design courses require students to maintain a paper-based personal design notebook or journal. The potential advantages of a digital notebook have been described in the literature, but few reports can be found on the use of digital notebooks in practice. This paper describes the design and implementation of a cloud-based collaborative workspace to provide a shared team design notebook. The shared workspace uses Microsoft SharePoint sites and Microsoft OneNote notebooks as the main components. SharePoint sites were created for 34 design teams in a 2nd-year engineering design course. Each site had a team notebook, document library, discussion forum, and task scheduler. Instructions and training were provided at the beginning of the course. Students were able to use the tools with little difficulty, and were able to use them as an effective replacement for a paper notebook. However, many teams did not make full use of the available capabilities, and there was little evidence of higher-level collaborative activities. The described implementation is technically and financially feasible, is scalable to large classes, and satisfies most of the requirements of a collaborative design notebook. However, scaffolding and training are needed to ensure that students collaborate effectively.


Author(s):  
Meisha Rosenberg ◽  
Judy M. Vance

Successful collaborative design requires in-depth communication between experts from different disciplines. Many design decisions are made based on a shared mental model and understanding of key features and functions before the first prototype is built. Large-Scale Immersive Computing Environments (LSICEs) provide the opportunity for teams of experts to view and interact with 3D CAD models using natural human motions to explore potential design configurations. This paper presents the results of a class exercise where student design teams used an LSICE to examine their design ideas and make decisions during the design process. The goal of this research is to gain an understanding of (1) whether the decisions made by the students are improved by full-scale visualizations of their designs in LSICEs, (2) how the use of LSICEs affect the communication of students with collaborators and clients, and (3) how the interaction methods provided in LSICEs affect the design process. The results of this research indicate that the use of LSICEs improves communication among design team members.


Author(s):  
Li Zhu ◽  
Barbara R. Barricelli ◽  
Claudia Iacob

As collaboration in creating software systems becomes more complex and frequent among multidisciplinary teams, finding new strategies to support this collaboration becomes crucial. The challenge is to bridge the communication gaps among stakeholders with diverse cultural and professional backgrounds. Moreover, future uses and issues cannot be completely anticipated at design time, and it is necessary to develop open-ended software environments that can be evolved and tailored in opportunistic ways to tackle co-evolution of users and systems. A conceptual meta-design model, the Hive-Mind Space (HMS) model, has been proposed to support multidisciplinary design teams’ collaboration and foster their situated innovation. The model provides localized habitable environments for diverse stakeholders and tools for them to tailor the system, allowing the co-evolution of systems and practices. The authors explore the possibility of utilizing boundary objects within the HMS model to facilitate the communication amongst stakeholders as well as their participation in the creative distributed design process. Two concrete case studies, a factory automation and the Valchiavenna Portal, demonstrate the implementation of the HMS model and provide a possible solution to overcome the complex, evolving and emerging nature of the collaborative design.


Author(s):  
Yujing Yang ◽  
Natalie Brik ◽  
Peter de Jong ◽  
Milene Guerreiro Goncalves

AbstractFraming is a crucial skill for connecting problem and solution spaces in the creative design process, both for individuals and teams. Frames are implicit in individuals’ cognitive thinking, but the creation of shared frames plays a vital role in collaborative design. Many studies have attempted to describe the framing process, but little is still known about how to support designers in framing, specifically in teams. This paper addresses this gap, by exploring the connection between sketching and framing within interdisciplinary teams. Following a qualitative and explorative approach, we have investigated the process and outcome of five interdisciplinary teams. We identified that sketching assists in the creation and elaboration of frames. Furthermore, in tandem with discussion and reflection, sketching helps increase the chance of a frame to survive within the design process. Our findings have practical and educational implications for improving the creative design process in interdisciplinary teams.


Buildings ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 461
Author(s):  
Eduardo I. Galaz-Delgado ◽  
Rodrigo F. Herrera ◽  
Edison Atencio ◽  
Felipe Muñoz-La Rivera ◽  
Clarissa N. Biotto

There is no comprehensive understanding of the problems that may impact the performance of the different actors that participate in the design of construction projects. In the absence of clarity about the problems and challenges that may impact the interactions, it is not possible to propose action plans to optimize the performance of the design teams. Therefore, this study proposes to identify the main problems and challenges in the interactions of design teams in building projects. A mixed review method is used to integrate bibliometric reviews, systematic reviews, and social network analysis to build a complete picture of the reviewed topic while highlighting certain key areas to ensure in-depth research. To achieve the objective of this work, the research was divided into three stages: (1) study of interactions in design teams; (2) identification of problems in design team interactions; and (3) study of problems in design team interactions. Through this study, four current major trends of research were identified: (1) Collaboration and BIM; (2) Design teams in the construction industry; (3) Design management; and (4) Collaborative design methodologies and processes. In addition, the most relevant problems or challenges within design team interactions arise in communication, collaboration, coordination, trust, and role identification.


Author(s):  
Carolynn J. Walthall ◽  
Srikanth Devanathan ◽  
Lorraine Kisselburgh ◽  
Karthik Ramani ◽  
E. Daniel Hirleman ◽  
...  

Wikis, freely editable collections of web pages, are showing potential for a flexible documentation and communication tool for collaborative design tasks. They also provide a medium that can be further transformed by properly understanding both the need for flexibility as well as support for design thinking early in the design process. The purpose of this work is to analyze the different dimensions of the wiki from a communication perspective as applicable to design. With a focus on communication in design, we will explore the advantages and disadvantages of using wikis in student engineering design teams. Our ultimate goal is to better support the design process while exploiting the potential for increasing the shared understanding among teams using a wiki. By introducing a wiki in a globally distributed product development course, students gain hands-on experience in using wikis as a design tool. Feedback from students will be collected through questionnaires and used to improve and transform the wiki as a support tool for communication during early design collaboration.


Author(s):  
John F. Dannenhoffer ◽  
Barry D. Davidson ◽  
Anthony R. Ingraffea ◽  
Alan T. Zehnder ◽  
Scott L. Jones

The mantra of industry today is to design products and processes using collaborative design teams. While the potential benefits of such a design philosophy are numerous and significant, many organizations find themselves falling short in the implementation. Sometimes these shortcomings are due to cultural and technical difficulties in the organization, but too frequently they are due to a lack of knowledge as to how to collaborate effectively. Described herein is an educational initiative by Syracuse and Cornell Universities to together teach collaborative design methodologies through a common two-semester, senior-level engineering design course. In the course, not only are the lectures taught to the two cohorts of students using at-a-distance technologies, but the students are teamed in cross-university teams to execute a series of 6-week design challenges, from preliminary through detailed thermal-structural design of the external skins of seconds-generation reusable launch vehicles. An Advanced Interactive Discovery Environment (AIDE), which is a computer-based infrastructure specifically designed for this course, is used to support both synchronous and asynchronous communications amongst the team members and with the faculty. Extensive surveys of the students, together with faculty observations, indicate that proper use of collaboration tools can facilitate effective geographically-dispersed design teams, making them as successful as local design teams.


2005 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janeen M. Hammond ◽  
Craig M. Harvey ◽  
Richard J. Koubek ◽  
W. Dale Compton ◽  
Ashok Darisipudi

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