Design Team Framing: Paths and Principles

Abstract

This paper addresses two major challenges new product development teams face in making a product people want. The first challenge is to frame the design situation based on a real need of a customer. The second challenge is to get everyone on the team in agreement about what that framing is — everyone needs to be on the same page about what it is they’re doing. Yet these two challenges are not independent, they are intertwined with each other, connected by the concrete research and sharing activities the teams perform. We introduce a framework to help understand the path of a design team along these two dimensions as well as illustrations of the three most common paths observed among graduate multidisciplinary new product development teams as supported by interviews and survey data. These case studies form the basis of four themes to help teams navigate the new product development process.

Charge exchange recombination spectroscopy on a diagnostic hydrogen beam—measuring impurity rotation and radial electric field at the tokamak TEXTOR

“…Corrections regarding finite slit height [29] , Zeeman effect and Fine-structure are applied [2,21,22] during the analysis process and thus accounted for regarding the resulting temperatures and velocities. Corrections regarding CXRS cross-sections are negligible due to the low temperatures and perpendicular viewing angle [43].…”

Supporting the synthesis of information in design teams

“…This led to an increase group rapport and better results. Other researchers also showed that discussions play an important role and teams that synthesize their knowledge into a shared understanding tend to have more successful design processes and outcomes [13,15]. Our research seeks to embody these findings into computational support for data synthesis.…”

“…Filtering, organizing and making sense of uncertain and ambiguous information is complicated and exhausting [13,20]. Teamwork can help support this critical phase of the design process, but it also introduces the difficulty of creating a common ground and making decisions that all team members support [14].…”

“…To support teams in forming a shared understanding, the Synthesis Guide creates explicit representations of knowledge structures [39] and lets the team compare and analyze different representations. If the team is not aware of these differences before a decision, this may result in conflicts that hinder the ongoing progress and it is important to understand each other's perspectives [13]. When people apply tags individually, they do it without being influenced by their co-workers.…”

“…In related work, this understanding of synthesis also may be referred to as collaborative synthesis [32], framing [13,14,35], sensemaking [25,30], collaborative sensemaking [27,39], or information analysis [17].…”