Communication roles that support collaboration during the design process

Abstract

It is" widely acknowledged that design (and development) teams increasingly include participants from different domains who must explore and integrate their specialized knowledge in order to create innovative and competitive artefacts and reduce design and development costs. Thus communication, including integration of specialized knowledge and negotiation of differences among domain specialists, has emerged as a fundamental component of the design process. This paper presents 13 communication roles that emerged during four multidisciplinary design situations in the USA and Europe. These roles supported knowledge exploration and integration, collaboration, and task and project completion by filtering and providing information and negotiating differences across organizational, task, discipline and personal boundaries. Implications for design methods, tools and education are discussed.

Communication issues in requirements elicitation: a content analysis of stakeholder experiences

“…The adoption of roles holds implications for communication as 'mediating posts', for the knowledge transfer of requirements. The uptake of these roles provides the means through which knowledge exploration and collaboration and negotiation (in the case of conflict) can be enabled [50]. All of these activities are important in the successful communication of requirements.…”

Using Network Science to Support Design Research: From Counting to Connecting

“…Sosa 2010), and the analysis of organisational roles (e.g. Sonnenwald 1996). Finally, in the product domain, the interconnected architecture of components has also been analysed (Baldwin et al 2013;Sosa et al 2007) to explore issues such as product quality (e.g.…”

Making Sense of Communication Associated with Artifacts during Early Design Activity

“…Communication is a central part of the ideation process, especially for creative, nonroutine design activity [1,2]. Many types of communication (e.g., client correspondence, brainstorm discussions, and feedback on initial ideas) influence the ideation process.…”

“…Research on design has underscored the importance of communication in the design process [27],examining it in specific situations such as studying communication roles [8] and negotiation strategies [2,8] within co-located teams [9,27]or specific types of communication such as rationale related to design choices [10,11]. Research on collaborative and participatory design focused on the importance of 2 Related Work…”