CAN ALGORITHMS CALCULATE THE “REAL” SHAREDNESS IN DESIGN TEAMS?
Year: 2015
Editor: Christian Weber, Stephan Husung, Marco Cantamessa, Gaetano Cascini, Dorian Marjanovic, Francesca Montagna
Author: Yamada, Kaori; Badke-Schaub, Petra; Eris, Ozgur
Series: ICED
Institution: 1: Kobe University, Japan; 2: Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Section: Design Organisation and Management
Page(s): 349-358
ISBN: 978-1-904670-66-7
ISSN: 2220-4334
Abstract
Mental models have gained recognition as critical cognitive elements in design research. The members of a design team need to develop a shared mental model if their individual knowledge is to be used effectively. In this research, we investigate the development of shared mental models during team-based design collaboration by analyzing the words that are spoken by team members and focusing on the abstraction level of the discussion content. First, we apply the KeyGraph algorithm to differentiate spoken words according to their abstraction level. KeyGraph can extract words that represent the discussion based on their co-occurrence. We treat the extracted words as abstract level concepts. Next, we propose a method to analyse sharedness by identifying overlaps of the extracted words between team members. Then, we analyse a case by using the proposed method and compare the sharedness between abstraction levels. The results show that the general level sharedness is higher than the abstract level sharedness. They also show that a lack of sharedness among all of the members of a team does not imply lack of sharedness among subsets of the team members.
Keywords: Design Cognition, Collaborative Design, Shared Mental Models, Abstraction Level