Team Interactions in Digitally-Mediated Design Meetings

Abstract

The complexity of multi-disciplinary design increasingly relies on the use of digital media to support design team interactions to communicate and understand the design. Digital media are often employed in design process to facilitate team interactions by allowing the team members to visualize and virtually walk through digital information. Hence, it is assumed that these spaces facilitate activities such as authoring, visualizing and sharing design information, as well as establishing mutual understanding of design content among team members. However, detailed understanding of how the design team interact to communicate and understand design information and how specific features of the digital media support activities and actions of the team during architectural design meetings within the context of practice appear to be limited. This study seeks to understand how the design team interact in digitally mediated spaces to communicate and understand design information and how salient features of the digital space mediate activities that emerge during collaborative design task. This paper describes initial analysis of design team activities in digitally mediated design meetings in an architectural design office in UK. The main empirical video recording of de-sign team meetings is ongoing. Initial results reveal that members in design teams accomplish task through sharing of information, description and explanation of design details, evaluation and prediction of alternative solutions, decision making, as well authoring, visualisation and navigation of design data. The paper concludes that design teams interact differently across varying digital media and associated data set and that task performance appears to be higher in digital spaces with varying features and rich data set.