scholarly journals Influencers in design teams: a computational framework to study their impact on idea generation

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Harshika Singh ◽  
Gaetano Cascini ◽  
Christopher McComb
Keyword(s):  
Social Influence ◽  
Model Simulation ◽  
Solution Space ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Design Solution ◽  
Computational Framework ◽  
Team Members ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Influential Individuals

Abstract It is known that wherever there is human interaction, there is social influence. Here, we refer to more influential individuals as “influencers”, who drive team processes for better or worst. Social influence gives rise to social learning, the propensity of humans to mimic the most influential individuals. As individual learning is affected by the presence of an influencer, so is an individual's idea generation . Examining this phenomenon through a series of human studies would require an enormous amount of time to study both individual and team behaviors that affect design outcomes. Hence, this paper provides an agent-based approach to study the effect of influencers during idea generation. This model is supported by the results of two empirical experiments which validate the assumptions and sustain the logic implemented in the model. The results of the model simulation make it possible to examine the impact of influencers on design outcomes, assessed in the form of exploration of design solution space and quality of the solution. The results show that teams with a few prominent influencers generate solutions with limited diversity. Moreover, during idea generation, the behavior of the teams with uniform distribution of influence is regulated by their team members' self-efficacy.

scholarly journals A Computational Framework for Exploring the Socio-Cognitive Features of Teams and their Influence on Design Outcomes

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Harshika Singh ◽  
Gaetano Cascini ◽  
Hernan Casakin ◽  
Vishal Singh
Keyword(s):  
Size Structure ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Computational Framework ◽  
New Members ◽  
Learning Abilities ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Agent Based ◽  
Proposed Model ◽  
Dependent Parameter ◽  
The Impact

AbstractThe dynamics of design teams play a critical role in product development, mainly in the early phases of the process. This paper presents a conceptual framework of a computational model about how cognitive and social features of a design team affect the quality of the produced design outcomes. The framework is based on various cognitive and social theories grounded in literature. Agent-Based Modelling (ABM) is used as a tool to evaluate the impact of design process organization and team dynamics on the design outcome. The model describes key research parameters, including dependent, independent, and intermediates. The independent parameters include: duration of a session, number of times a session is repeated, design task and team characteristics such as size, structure, old and new members. Intermediates include: features of team members (experience, learning abilities, and importance in the team) and social influence. The dependent parameter is the task outcome, represented by creativity and accuracy. The paper aims at laying the computational foundations for validating the proposed model in the future.

Helping Teams Expand the Breadth of Their Solution Space Through Product Dissection: A Simulation Based Investigation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Alsager Alzayed ◽  
Christopher McComb ◽  
Samuel T. Hunter ◽  
Scarlett R. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Education ◽  
Computational Simulation ◽  
Effective Means ◽  
Solution Space ◽  
First Year ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Engineering Design Education ◽  
Simulation Based ◽  
The Impact

Product dissection has been highlighted as an effective means of interacting with example products in order to produce creative outcomes. While product dissection is often conducted as a team in engineering design education as a component of larger engineering design projects, the research on the effectiveness of product dissection activities has been primarily limited to individuals. Thus, the goal of this study was to investigate the impact of the type(s) of product dissected in a team environment on the breadth of the design space explored and the underlying influence of educational level on these effects. This was accomplished through a computational simulation of 7,000 nominal brainstorming teams generated by a statistical bootstrapping technique that accounted for all possible team configurations. Specifically, each team was composed of four team members based on a design repository of 463 ideas generated by first-year and senior engineering design students after a product dissection activity. The results of the study highlight that simulated senior engineering design teams explored a larger solution space than simulated first-year teams and that dissecting different types of products allowed for the exploration of a larger solution space for all of the teams. The results also showed that dissecting two analogically far and two simple products was most effective in expanding the solution space for simulated senior teams. The findings presented in this study can lead to a better understanding of how to most effectively deploy product dissection modules in engineering design education in order to maximize the solution space explored.

scholarly journals THE IMPACT OF STATUS ANONYMITY ON TEAM DYNAMICS IN CO-CREATION WORKSHOPS

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 1465-1474
Author(s):  
A. Lecuna Aguerrevere ◽  
J. Alleblas ◽  
R. M. Mueller ◽  
M. Graves ◽  
K. Thoring
Keyword(s):  
Idea Generation ◽  
Team Dynamics ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Positive Effects ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Early Phases ◽  
Partial Status

AbstractThis paper looks at the positive effects of partial status anonymity in face-to-face co-creation workshops. Results suggest that especially during the early phases of co-creation, i.e. idea generation, participants experience more freedom to express themselves without self-imposed barriers. We observed positive effects in terms of (1) lowering or even suspending the perceived status among team members, (2) increased motivation, (3) freedom to speak and positive disposition to listen, (4) willingness to consider perspectives from other team members.

The Impact of Team-Based Product Dissection on Design Novelty

2014 ◽  
Vol 136 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine A. Toh ◽  
Scarlett R. Miller ◽  
Gül E. Okudan Kremer
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Education ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Design Method ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Design Concepts ◽  
Engineering Design Education ◽  
Current Design ◽  
The Impact

Although design novelty is a critical area of research in engineering design, most research in this space has focused on understanding and developing formal idea generation methods instead of focusing on the impact of current design practices. This is problematic because formal techniques are often not adopted in industry due to the burdensome steps often included in these methods, which limit the practicality and adoption of these methods. This study seeks to understand the impact of product dissection, a design method widely utilized in academia and industry, on design novelty in order to produce recommendations for the use or alterations of this method for supporting novelty in design. To investigate the impact of dissection, a study was conducted with 76 engineering students who completed a team-based dissection of an electric toothbrush and then individually generated ideas. The relationships between involvement in the dissection activity, the product dissected, the novelty and quantity of the ideas developed were investigated. The results reveal that team members who were more involved in the dissection activity generated concepts that were more novel than those who did not. In addition, the type of the dissected product also had an influence on design novelty. Finally, a positive correlation between the number of ideas generated and the novelty of the design concepts was identified. The results from this study are used to provide recommendations for leveraging product dissection for enhancing novelty in engineering design education and practice.

Can Design Teams Be Empathically Creative? A Simulation-Based Investigation on the Role of Team Empathy on Concept Generation and Selection

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Alsager Alzayed ◽  
Scarlett R. Miller ◽  
Jessica Menold ◽  
Jacquelyn Huff ◽  
Christopher McComb
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Computational Simulation ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
First Year ◽  
Concept Generation ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Design Activities ◽  
The Impact

Abstract Research on empathy has been surging in popularity in the engineering design community since empathy is known to help designers develop a deeper understanding of the users’ needs. Because of this, the design community has been invested in devising and assessing empathic design activities. However, research on empathy has been primarily limited to individuals, meaning we do not know how it impacts team performance, particularly in the concept generation and selection stages of the design process. Specifically, it is unknown how the empathic composition of teams, average (elevation) and standard deviation (diversity) of team members’ empathy, would impact design outcomes in the concept generation and selection stages of the design process. Therefore, the goal of the current study was to investigate the impact of team trait empathy on concept generation and selection in an engineering design student project. This was accomplished through a computational simulation of 13,482 teams of noninteracting brainstorming individuals generated by a statistical bootstrapping technique drawing upon a design repository of 806 ideas generated by first-year engineering students. The main findings from the study indicate that the elevation in team empathy positively impacted simulated teams’ unique idea generation and selection while the diversity in team empathy positively impacted teams’ generation of useful ideas. The results from this study can be used to guide team formation in engineering design.

Effect of Team Size on Problem-Solving and Solution Quality: An Empirical Study

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Jacobs ◽  
Matthew Pfarr ◽  
Mohammad Fazelpour ◽  
Abdul Koroma ◽  
Tseday Mesfin
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
Empirical Study ◽  
Design Solution ◽  
Design Team ◽  
Design Teams ◽  
Team Size ◽  
Solution Quality ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Protocol Study ◽  
The Impact

Abstract The size of a team can affect how they tackle a design problem and solution quality. This paper presents a protocol study of the impact of team size on problem-solving and design solution quality. The protocols are coded with micro-strategies, and macro-strategies, and final solutions are scored using a rubric of meeting constraints, manufacturability, feasibility, and cost. The results show that the larger design team sizes analyze design solutions more frequently and propose solutions less than the smaller design teams. Among the three team sizes of 1, 3, and 5, the teams of three designers scored the best on final designs. These teams used a fair amount of both proposing solutions and analyzing solutions of micro-strategies. The teams of 5 designers use backtracking macro-strategies more frequent than teams of 3 and one because as the team size increases, more time is spent among team members to discuss previous ideas.

scholarly journals Visual Inspection or Product Dissection? The Impact of Designer-Product Interactions on Engineering Design Creativity

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine A. Toh ◽  
Scarlett R. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Visual Inspection ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Solution Space ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Controlled Study ◽  
Creative Thought ◽  
Design Creativity ◽  
Product Interaction ◽  
The Impact

Designers commonly interact with products in the early phases of design in order to understand the solution space and gain inspiration for new designs. Although designer-product interaction methods such as visual inspection and product dissection are recognized as a pivotal component of the engineering design process, little data is available on how these practices affect idea generation or when these activities are most useful for inspiring creative thought. Therefore, the current study was developed to understand the impact of these activities on creative idea generation. During our controlled study, fifty-nine undergraduate engineering students were instructed to either visually inspect or physically dissect an example milk frother and then generate ideas for a new, innovative design. These concepts were then evaluated for their novelty, variety, quality and quantity. Our analysis (ANOVA) revealed that participants who physically dissected the example frother produced ideas that were more novel but of lower quality than those that simply inspected the frother. Our results provide insights on the impact of designer-product interactions on creativity and we use these findings to develop recommendations for the use and alterations of these practices for improving creativity in engineering design.

Groups and teams: a review of bad apple behavior

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (5/6) ◽  
pp. 243-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saravana Jaikumar ◽  
Avina Mendonca
Keyword(s):  
Group Performance ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Work Behavior ◽  
Supporting Evidence ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Groups And Teams ◽  
Interpersonal Deviance ◽  
The Impact

Purpose The purpose of this conceptual paper is to broaden the understanding of the three negative member (bad apple) behaviors – withholding of effort, interpersonal deviance and negative affect – put forth by Felps et al. (2006). Design/methodology/approach An integrative review of extant literature was conducted to understand the impact of the negative member behaviors on other team members. Potential interventions to control this bad apple behavior are identified with supporting evidence from recent empirical studies. Findings A review of empirical findings in the literature indicate that perceived coworker loafing may lead to counterproductive work behavior toward coworkers and interpersonal deviance may affect the task cohesion of the group. However, the presence of affectively negative individuals is empirically proven to improve the group performance, especially when the group task is related to creativity or information processing (decision-making and idea generation). Originality/value Despite the empirical attention paid to “bad apple” behaviors, the implications for managing negative member behaviors are unclear and scattered. In this paper, building on the framework proposed by Felps et al. (2006), the authors focus on three behaviors and provide a concise review of literature and interventions to control or exploit these behaviors.

THE IMPACT OF LEADERSHIP PRACTICES TO TEAM MEMBERS’ SATISFACTION

2009 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chalimah .
Keyword(s):  
Conflict Resolution ◽  
Leadership Practices ◽  
Hotel Industry ◽  
Leader Behavior ◽  
Team Leader ◽  
Shop Floor ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Top Executives ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Impact

eamwork is becoming increasingly important to wide range of operations. It applies to all levels of the company. It is just as important for top executives as it is to middle management, supervisors and shop floor workers. Poor teamwork at any level or between levels can seriously damage organizational effectiveness. The focus of this paper was therefore to examine whether leadership practices consist of team leader behavior, conflict resolution style and openness in communication significantly influenced the team member’s satisfaction in hotel industry. Result indicates that team leader behavior and the conflict resolution style significantly influenced team member satisfaction. It was surprising that openness in communication did not affect significantly to the team members’ satisfaction.

scholarly journals An Evaluation Methodology for Interactive Reinforcement Learning with Simulated Users

Biomimetics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Adam Bignold ◽  
Francisco Cruz ◽  
Richard Dazeley ◽  
Peter Vamplew ◽  
Cameron Foale
Keyword(s):  
Reinforcement Learning ◽  
Information Source ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Evaluation Methodology ◽  
External Information ◽  
Preliminary Evaluation ◽  
Learning Agents ◽  
Learning Agent ◽  
Knowledge Bias ◽  
The Impact

Interactive reinforcement learning methods utilise an external information source to evaluate decisions and accelerate learning. Previous work has shown that human advice could significantly improve learning agents’ performance. When evaluating reinforcement learning algorithms, it is common to repeat experiments as parameters are altered or to gain a sufficient sample size. In this regard, to require human interaction every time an experiment is restarted is undesirable, particularly when the expense in doing so can be considerable. Additionally, reusing the same people for the experiment introduces bias, as they will learn the behaviour of the agent and the dynamics of the environment. This paper presents a methodology for evaluating interactive reinforcement learning agents by employing simulated users. Simulated users allow human knowledge, bias, and interaction to be simulated. The use of simulated users allows the development and testing of reinforcement learning agents, and can provide indicative results of agent performance under defined human constraints. While simulated users are no replacement for actual humans, they do offer an affordable and fast alternative for evaluative assisted agents. We introduce a method for performing a preliminary evaluation utilising simulated users to show how performance changes depending on the type of user assisting the agent. Moreover, we describe how human interaction may be simulated, and present an experiment illustrating the applicability of simulating users in evaluating agent performance when assisted by different types of trainers. Experimental results show that the use of this methodology allows for greater insight into the performance of interactive reinforcement learning agents when advised by different users. The use of simulated users with varying characteristics allows for evaluation of the impact of those characteristics on the behaviour of the learning agent.

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