Feedback on Collaborative Skills in Remote Studio Design

Abstract

The study reported here examines how feedback affects remote collaborative brainstorming and product design in a studio setting. 10 teams of 4 students at the Parsons School of Design met remotely via a chatroom interface for three 30-minute sessions to design a T-shirt. Team members who proposed ideas were rated as better collaborators, and team members who critiqued ideas without offering alternatives were rated as poor collaborators. This was also reflected in team members' word use, as measured by Pennebaker & Francis' Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count too; for example, team members who used more affect words were rated as poorer collaborators. A case study of one team suggests that the ideas proposed by team members rated as the best collaborators may be most likely to survive. Peer feedback can affect remote studio design discussion in ways comparable to what is found in other settings, despite task differences.

Visualizing real-time language-based feedback on teamwork behavior in computer-mediated groups

“…For example, higher rates of agreement words (e.g. yes, agree, ok) can predict low peer ratings on Bales and Cohen's [1] scale for evaluating teamwork practices [27]; the use of individual versus collective pronouns ('I' vs. 'we') can indicate a sense of group belonging [7]; and the use of reasoning expressions can indicate focus on the group task [46].…”

Feedback for guiding reflection on teamwork practices

“…Further, [3] found peer feedback to be superior in the quality of its results to expert-based feedback in learning environments. Peer feedback has been shown to motivate teams to alter their communication style, such as focusing more on the task at hand and using fewer words that were correlated with disliked collaborative moves [10].…”