Lifting the Veil: Drawing Insights about Design Teams from a Cognitively-inspired Computational Model

Abstract

Novel design methodologies are often evaluated through studies involving human designers, but such studies can incur a high personnel cost. It can also be difficult to isolate the effects of specific team or individual characteristics. This work introduces the Cognitively-Inspired Simulated Annealing Teams (CISAT) modeling framework, a platform for efficiently simulating and analyzing human design teams. The framework models a number of empirically demonstrated cognitive phenomena, thus balancing simplicity and direct applicability. This paper discusses the model's composition, and demonstrates its utility through simulating human design teams in a cognitive study. Simulation results are compared directly to the results from human designers. The CISAT model is also used to identify the most beneficial characteristics in the cognitive study. Keywords: computational model, design cognition, teamwork, engineering design Much cognitive research in engineering design has focused on individuals, despite the fact that most engineering design is actually performed by teams (Paulus, Dzindolet, & Kohn, 2011). This work focuses on developing a better understanding of team-based design through computationally simulating the team design process. Empirical studies are a common means for exploring design cognition and for testing new design methodologies. However, these studies can incur a high personnel cost while only returning a limited amount of data. It can also be difficult to isolate the effects of specific characteristics. This work introduces a computational framework that simulates teambased engineering design through creating software agents that directly solve engineering problems. In addition to offering a resource efficient test bed for evaluating design strategies, this framework can be used to test the conclusions from cognitive studies. It can be used to peel apart aspects of human design, and provides a succinct representation of designer behavior. The purpose of the framework is not to replace cognitive studies, but rather to augment traditional methods of investigation, accelerating the discovery of improved design methodologies.A significant amount of work has attempted to simulate the performance of both teams and individuals (Fan & Yen, 2004). For instance, both the Virtual Design Team model, and another model applied to teams at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, incorporate detailed descriptions of design team organization and interaction (Jin & Levit, 1996;Olson, Cagan, & Kotovsky, 2009). Both models were used to simulate complex design tasks, but were also burdened by high model complexity. For instance, the model by Olson et al. (2009) used approximately 1000 distinct variables, and required nearly 100000 lines of code for implementation. Still other work has utilized agent-based models to explore the formation of mental models during team problem-solving with respect to both interaction structure (Dionne, Sayama, Hao, & James, 2010) and agent memory (Sayama, Farrell, & Dionne, 2011). Mental ...

Optimizing Design Teams Based on Problem Properties: Computational Team Simulations and an Applied Empirical Test

“…This shift in priorities within a team is similar to a psychological phenomenon known as groupthink which can be harmful to decision-making teams [31]. In contrast, less frequent interaction may lead to the formation of weak ties between members of a team [30]. Weak ties can be beneficial because they facilitate the transmission of diverse perspectives between individuals [32].…”

“…However, interaction is not always beneficial when it is allowed. Computational simulations indicate that excessively frequent interaction can be detrimental to teams, resulting in the implicit prioritization of consensus over the search for good solutions [30]. This shift in priorities within a team is similar to a psychological phenomenon known as groupthink which can be harmful to decision-making teams [31].…”

“…Further, the current work does not involve human studies to determine the relationship, but instead utilizes the Cognitively-Inspired Simulated Annealing Teams (CISAT) modeling framework [30] (discussed in more detail in Section 2). This framework provides simulation capabilities for predicting the performance of human design teams.…”

“…CISAT is an agent-based platform that is designed to emulate patterns of behavior and performance exhibited by small human teams while solving configuration design problems [30]. CISAT simulations have been compared to the results of a human study, and CISAT effectively reproduced human trends in solution quality, level of divergence within the team, and the selection of topology versus parameter modifications [30].…”

“…The CISAT framework has been used in previous work to effectively replicate the results of a cognitive study [5,30] and to investigate the effects of operation sequencing in engineering design [45]. These prior studies used CISAT to simulate the design of truss structures with welldefined rules dictating how structures could be modified.…”