Investigating the Affective Force on Creating Shared Understanding
There is growing psychological research linking affect to the content and process of thinking. This paper deals with one aspect of affect and social cognition, the interaction of affect and shared understanding. It is theorized that affect may have cognitive processing consequences for shared understanding in design. In order to investigate this question, this paper develops a research method that brings together theories and instruments from cognitive science, linguistics, and design studies to study the link between affect and shared understanding in design. First, the paper reviews a framework for analyzing the process of creating shared understanding. Second, the paper presents a linguistic framework and analysis technique for extracting affective content from language based on the explicit, conscious expression of affect through favorable and unfavorable attitudes towards specific subjects. Third, the paper proposes a model of shared understanding that is interdependent, in part, with affective processing. The linguistic analysis and shared understanding analysis framework are applied to a transcript of collaborative design to illustrate how the affective content of designers’ communication shifts design activities. We find that our research method allows affect to be observed concurrently with cognitive processing and that, owing to the motivational consequences of affect, produces an axis of evaluation that could shed light on how affect organizes and drives the outcomes of design thinking.