Team Interactions in Digitally-Mediated Design Meetings

Abstract

The increasing demand for richer interactions in the design team and the reliance on digital media to facilitate their emergence tend to introduce a lot of dynamics into the exchanges that unfold in face-to-face design meetings. However, current knowledge on dynamics of exchanges in the design team appears to be insufficient to help enrich understanding of the nature of interactions in design meetings enabled by technologies in the digital space, although essential to inform planning of collaborative design tasks. The aim of this PhD is to better understand team interactions that unfold within the fluid digitally mediated design review meeting process; exploring the verbal and non-verbal actions that unfold and their effect on information representation and display medium during a face-to-face design meeting in an architectural practice. This aim was addressed through the following interconnected set of objectives:1. Explore forms of information representations and display medium mobilised, and how specific features of the media are implicated to mediate the verbal and nonverbal actions of the design team during the meeting session; 2. Examine nature of verbal and non-verbal actions that unfold and their effect on use of information representations and display medium during the meeting session; 3. Explore the interplay that exists between different types of interactions in the design team.This exploration was supported by the development of a conceptual framework that draws on concepts and techniques of mediated interaction approach (MIA) and use of technology in practice. To provide depth of insight and understanding, the research adopts a predominantly qualitative video-based approach with video recording and participant observation forming the primary techniques for gathering relevant data on verbal and non-verbal actions and activities V of the team members during design meetings mediated by digital media in an architectural design office in UK. A total of five design meeting sessions stretching over ten hours of rich interactions in a single case architectural firm were captured as relevant data to inform the study. The study uses a coding scheme informed by concepts of the conceptual model; and principles of Interaction Analysis (IA) approach to analyse the ways design teams interact to communicate the design and perform collaborative task in meeting sessions. The analysis provides narratives of themes relating to team interactions occurring in the digital space: features of media, purpose of use of media, verbal and non-verbal actions in relation to information representation and display medium, and interplay between the types of interactions. The findings reveal in general, evidence of distinction between the medium and the representation of information in relation to how they mediate emergence and accomplishment of specific types of actions during the meeting session. The information representation, through key features such as, photo realism, walkthrough, and navigable informed types of actions undertak...