Neeraj Sonalkar

Developing a visual representation to characterize moment-to-moment concept generation in design teams

Concept generation, an activity in which a number of design concepts are generated for further evaluation through prototyping and testing, is an important stage in the engineering design process. In design practice and design education, concept generation is often conducted in teams. During this activity, designers interact with one another to generate a number of design concepts. Prior research has either looked into the inter-relations between concepts generated, or into identifying specific interpersonal response behaviors in teams. There is a lack of explanation of how design concepts are generated moment-to-moment from the interpersonal interactions between designers. This paper presents the development of a visual notation called the Interaction Dynamics Notation for representing moment-to-moment concept generation through interpersonal interactions. This notation was developed through a video-observation study conducted with two engineering design teams engaged in a concept generation activity. Collective improvization was used to bridge concept generation and interpersonal behaviors into a single point of view for developing the notation. The validity of the notation is discussed in comparison with Linkography. The notation is shown to be effective in revealing patterns of interaction previously unfamiliar to design research.

A Structure for Design Theory

The field of engineering design research is being pulled into two opposing directions—toward scientific rigor on one hand, and a greater relevance for professional practice on the other. The development of design theories in the field reflects this dichotomy. We have formal design theories deriving from mathematical roots that rarely influence the practice. And we have a plethora of process models that serve as scaffolds for professional designing, but lack scientific validity. Can we create design theory that resolves this dichotomy and displays scientific rigor while being useful to professionals? In this chapter, we propose a structure for design theory that attempts to answer this question. Building on the structure of scientific theory from philosophy of science and the perception–action perspective from ethnographic research, we suggest a two-dimensional structure for design theory. The first dimension describes the theoretical constructs and relationships between them, and the second dimension provides the perceptual field and action repertoire that makes a theory relevant in situations of professional practice. We explain these two dimensions of design theory, while focusing on the second perception–action dimension that is our contribution to design research. We illustrate this by developing the perception–action dimension of C-K theory.

Diagnostics for Design Thinking Teams

Multidisciplinary teamwork is a key requirement in the design thinking approach to innovation. The tools currently available for effective team coaching are limited to heuristics derived from either experienced design thinking professionals or clinical psychology practitioners. Our research aims to improve this current situation by providing design thinking managers, coaches and instructors a scientifically validated tool for augmenting design team performance. We present the development of a software tool called the IDN Tool based on the Interaction Dynamics Notation to analyze team interactions and diagnose patterns of behavior that influence design outcomes. We demonstrate the use of the IDN Tool through analysis of the interaction behaviors of seven design teams engaged in a concept generation activity, which were independently rated by a two-person Jury using the criteria of utility and novelty. Through the analysis we were able to visually isolate the interaction behaviors that had a high positive or negative correlation with the levels of novelty and utility of concepts judged a priori. With further work, this has the potential of improving in-process design team performance with a positive influence on design outcomes.

Developing Instrumentation for Design Thinking Team Performance

Multidisciplinary teamwork is a key requirement in the design thinking approach to innovation. Previous research has shown that team coaching is an effective way to improve team performance. However, the tools currently available for effective team coaching are limited to heuristics derived from either experienced design thinking professionals or clinical psychology practitioners. Our research aims to improve this situation by providing design thinking managers, coaches, and instructors a reliable instrument for measuring design team performance. In this chapter, we present the underlying methodology for instrument design. The development of a specific diagnostic instrument, based on a visual notation called the Interaction Dynamics Notation, is explained in terms of both the workflow of data through the instrument and the exploratory studies conducted to design the instrument user interface.

Emotion in Engineering Design Teams

Knowledge that is relevant to the practice of engineering can be categorized into three domains. First is the knowledge of the natural world that we fashion into engineering artifacts. This includes knowledge domains such as physics, chemistry, biology, and thermodynamics. Second is the knowledge of processes that we may use to transform the natural world into engineered artifacts. These include various engineering design methods, production processes, and mathematical methods. The third is the knowledge of the humans creating and using the engineering artifacts. This involves understanding and improving how engineers perceive, think, and act individually or collectively, such as in teams or organizations, when they are engaged in the daily practice of engineering; and also understanding how the users of these artifacts perceive and interact with them in the course of their life cycle. This domain uses and synthesizes knowledge from other fields such as psychology, group work, cognitive science, sociology, and anthropology that focus on the human as a subject of study. However, it differs in one key respect from these fields in that its focus on the human is rooted in an engineering value system that seeks to understand in order to re-create artifacts and situations for the better. The study of emotion is an important part of the domain of humans creating and using engineering artifacts.

Design Whodunit: The Relationship Between Individual Characteristics and Interaction Behaviors in Design Concept Generation

This paper investigates the relationship between interaction behaviors and the cognitive characteristics of participating individuals in engineering design teams engaged in concept generation. Individual characteristics are measured using the Kirton Adaption Innovation inventory, which assesses cognitive preference for seeking and responding to change. Team interactions are measured using the Interaction Dynamics Notation, which allows for interaction behavior to be quantitatively analyzed. A correlation analysis reveals statistically significant correlation between individual characteristics and specific interaction behaviors. A sequence analysis of the team data also reveals specific interaction sequences associated with a greater probability of idea occurrence in team interaction. These findings could be taken as a first step towards building a cognitive-behavioral model of engineering design team performance.

Visualising professional vision interactions in design reviews

Abstract A visual notation called the interaction dynamics notation was used for analysing the moment-to-moment interpersonal interactions in design reviews. The expressions of professional vision (PV) – a system of seeing and interpreting that characterises a professional group – are identified in these design review interactions. The analysis showed that students’ participation was important to the articulation of PV in design reviews. Specifically, there were four interaction patterns – question-asking, supportive behaviour, building-on behaviour and humour that were associated with nine types of PV expressions in design review interactions. These interaction patterns are examined in the context of existing literature on design reviews. The implication of using the visual representation of review interactions as an educational tool is explored.

Monitoring Design Thinking Through In-Situ Interventions

Building on existing knowledge of design and design thinking we apply several other fields of knowledge such as emotion coding, improvisation, ethnography, social psychology, and decision analysis into key metrics we call Design Thinking Metrics (DTM). We applied these metrics to analyze and assess videos of software design teams. We then conducted a workshop series with a professional software design team to use DTM as a perceptual tool to test a number of action-repertoires and building theory that could be used to improve Design Thinking practice. The result is multi-disciplinary perceptual monitoring of design thinking activity in professional software practice.

A Conceptual Framework for Understanding the Impact of Digital Libraries on Engineering Design Learning

Engineering design is an information intensive activity. Right from need finding to final prototyping, designers are constantly acquiring, assimilating, transforming and giving out information. In fact in a design process, designers act as autonomous learners actively seeking and processing information. However, the mechanism by which information influences design learning is not well understood. This paper presents a conceptual framework for studying the impact of information resources on design learning based on a survey conducted on engineering students participating in a two-week long global collaborative design exercise to build bicycles out of paper materials.Copyright

Redesigning Social Organization for Accelerated Innovation in the New Digital Economy: A Design Thinking Perspective

We now appear to be in the full grip of the media transformation from paper-based media to a digital-based media. This evolution in mobility of information (experiences) has occurred alongside the mobility of matter and labor (goods and services, mass and heat), all of which have come about as a result of evolution in technologies of encryption, computation, communication, representation, sensing, and transportation. All these changes have contributed to a market environment that is more open, connected, complex, and dynamic, and to corporate and civic organizational configurations that are overwhelmed and slow to adapt to these changes. In the Hasso Plattner Design Thinking Research program, we have been observing these changes, and developing solutions to accelerate the rate of innovation in the new digital economy. Our work has led us to focus on the design team, the design coach, and the instrumented design space as the new unit of knowledge work, as opposed to the individual employees and line manager. This new unit is larger than the individual and so can take in more information. It is smaller than the typical organizational group or department, so it is faster to act and more agile. And the data rich and computational nature of the instrumented space, means that the technology can be considered a bona fide member of the design team. The variety of organizational structures now possible as well as the way these structures need to change in very short time frames has made it necessary to develop a biological metaphor of the organization as an organism that can fold, unfold, and refold as it adapts rapidly to a fast-changing environment. This radical shift from the hierarchical, clockwork, command and control organizations of the industrial age, will be explored with a view to showing alternative redesign of social organizations and the means to accomplish the requisite sociological, psychological, and technological transformations effectively.