Cognitive Challenges for Teamwork in Design

This chapter combines experimental data and established design theory to examine four issues associated with design cognition that contribute to an improved understanding of creativity and teamwork in design. Drawing on data developed from two parametric design experiments undertaken by the authors, this chapter investigates the implications of (i) cognitive space, (ii) design strategy, (iii) design productivity and (iv) spatial representation, for individuals, and by inference, for groups and educators. Through this process the chapter develops a deeper understanding of the cognitive challenges facing design teams and educators of those teams.

Teaching Teamwork in Design

This chapter proposes an Input-Process-Output framework for understanding what impacts the effectiveness of teamwork when higher education students are collaborating on design assignments. The framework can help design educators integrate teamwork into their courses and better evaluate learning outcomes, and may also elucidate good practice for professional design teams. Explaining the genesis of the framework, the literature is assimilated on team effectiveness and predictors of team performance, including: definitions, dimensions and frameworks of team effectiveness in contexts far wider than design education. Informed by the challenges specific to teaching design, a 22-factor framework is proposed. The paper concludes with recommendations for teachers informed by the framework. The viability of the 22-factor model of team effectiveness is evidenced by national surveys across Australia, which are reported in summary here.

Informal Networked Learning as Teamwork in Design Studio CmyView

CmyView is a research project that investigates how mobile technologies have the potential to facilitate new ways to share, experience and understand the connections that people have with places. The aim of the project is to theorise and develop a tool and a methodology that addresses the reception of architecture and the built environment using mobile digital technologies that harness ubiquitous everyday practices, such as photography and walking. While CmyView is primarily focused on evidencing the reception of places, this chapter argues that these activities can also make a contribution to the core pedagogy of architectural education, the design studio. This chapter presents findings of an initial pilot study with four students at an Australian university that demonstrates how CmyView offers a valuable contribution to the educational experience in the design studio.

Levering Critical Collaboration

This chapter presents an intervention in Design Thinking, a first year interdisciplinary design subject at the University of Technology Sydney. Over two iterations of this subject, researchers reframed the ‘group work' component as critical collaboration, drawing from the momentum in the design professions for more participatory and collaborative processes and the increasing acknowledgement of design as being critical to sustainable human futures. The online self and peer assessment tool SPARKPlus was used to change the way students approached collaboration and then reflected on it following their experiences. In this model, self and peer assessment is used as a leaver to encourage critical thinking about collaboration, rather than as a hammer to enforce participation.

Perceptions of Collaboration Amongst Novice Design Students

This chapter presents a case study of a large common first year unit/subject in a major Australian university. The unit introduces students to the theory and practice of design through a learning environment that is brief and intense; being delivered in block mode over just four days, and being free of other academic commitments. Students choose from one of two concurrent environments, either a camping field trip or an on-campus alternative, and work in mixed discipline groups of six to nine students, on two sequential design projects. Participant survey and reflective journal data are used to analyse student perceptions of the learning activities and to establish the pedagogical success of learning about collaboration through the act of collaborating; specifically through a project-based design environment. The data supports the hypothesis that groups that emotionally engaged with collaboration and collaborated more effectively achieved higher academic grades.

Learning Design Through Facilitating Collaborative Design

This chapter presents a project in which students taking an undergraduate course on Design Thinking participated in a university widening participation project, visiting local schools from a low socioeconomic status background and engaging the school students in a design exercise. The project aimed to draw on the value of service learning, learning through an engaged and socially meaningful task, with tertiary students learning to facilitate design, following principles of co-design, in a community of stakeholders, and secondary students gaining contact with university life, seeing an undergraduate perspective on design, and receiving education in design thinking. Tertiary students were asked to develop design thinking toolkits that would support their design facilitation process. The authors present the results of a study of the project, based on students' assignment submissions, and a focus group following the activity.

Using a Value Cycle Framework to Analyze Teamwork Capability as a Learning Outcome in Interior Design Studio Courses

Previous research on teaching and learning in the design disciplines has demonstrated the complex set of factors which need to be aligned in order for our students to be prepared for professional practice in teamwork. This chapter reports on ongoing work to extend this previous research, including integration with an institutional learning outcomes framework, incorporation of insights from beyond the design disciplines to engage student motivation in capability development, and a specific interest in the ways team teaching in design studios can contribute to the development of students' teamwork capability (in addition to advancing their development of design capability).

An Evaluation of Group Work in First-Year Engineering Design Education

It is argued that ‘design' is an essential characteristic of engineering practice, and hence, an essential theme of engineering education. It is suggested that first-year design courses enhance commencing student motivation and retention, and introduce engineering application content and basic design experience early in the curriculum. The research literature indicates that engineering design practice is a deeply social process, with collaboration and group interactions required at almost every stage. This chapter documents the evaluation of the initial and subsequent second offerings of a first-year engineering design unit at Griffith University in Australia. The unit 1006ENG Design and Professional Skills aims to provide an introduction to engineering design and professional practice through a project-based approach to problem solving. The unit learning design incorporates student group work, and uses self-and-peer-assessment to incorporate aspects of the design process into the unit assessment and to provide a mechanism for individualization of student marks.

Embracing Non-Traditional Partnerships in Design Education

This chapter reviews the outline, process, and structure of the LEED Lab course at North Carolina State University (NCSU), which has engaged students from multiple colleges across the University. This chapter will specifically address NCSU's particular approach to teamwork in design education, using an existing building on NCSU's campus and an established assessment framework to provide context. With the LEED for Existing Buildings Operations and Maintenance as a guide, interdisciplinary teams of students worked together to establish recommendations for future operations. Additional teamwork opportunities included the engagement of a number of NCSU facilities departments, including Repairs and Renovation, Energy Services, Waste Reduction and Recycling, and others. Using examples of team-building exercises, integration with NCSU's Facilities Division, in-class hands-on exercises, and in-process photographs, this chapter will walk the reader through the opportunities and challenges of integrating non-traditional teamwork exercises into design education processes.

Collaborative Spectra

Two teaching experiences that structured individual student learning through the designed variation of group work opportunities are examined: a graduate architectural design studio and a repeated undergraduate course focused on methods and approaches for designing. The teaching approaches draw on participatory design and group learning theories. Group work was structured as a series of overlapping layers to bring about an individual learning experience and a shared studio experience of creativity. Various outcomes are read against an excerpt from Nancy's “The Inoperative Community” in Bishop's Participation (2006b). The discussion is a means to further explore common interests in designing design processes, in particular through developing collaborative learning in design, and a social-reflective practice in students. The authors are figuring yet another way of developing creativity wherein a student's skills, projects, and ideas come out of, and are intersected by a complexity of social processes, oppositions and the spectra that define them.