A model of information processing and interactions in teams developing technical systems

Teamwork is often regarded as a critical operation element of product development organisations, whereas an efficient team-based approach to engineering design activities is a prerequisite for the success of technical systems development projects. Design team members thus need assistance in the form of methods and tools that will facilitate collaboration during team design activities, inasmuch as researchers and project managers require support in developing and prescribing the most appropriate and efficient methods and tools for the particular design tasks. The research reported in the thesis aims at improving the understanding of designing in teams, primarily in the stage of conceptual design and from the perspective of information processing. A more specific research aim has been formed as follows: to review, develop and test models of team design activity in the development of technical systems, which will build on information processing and interactions appearing in team design activities in the conceptual design stage of the development. The main purpose of these models is to enhance decision-making and planning of technical systems development, by enabling both capturing and generating data sets that reflect process patterns distinctive for specific team compositions and working processes. A state-transition-based theoretical and mathematical models have been developed and used to experimentally investigate the patterns of design operations performed during two types of team conceptual design activities – ideation and concept review – as well as two types of engineering design projects – adaptive and innovative. The presented work builds on the perception of design problems as ill-defined and implies that conceptual design activities involve the simultaneous development of problems and solutions through the usage of three distinctive design operations: analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. The three design operations have been defined as fine-grain design information-processing acts performed by design teams when exploring the content of both the problem space and the solution space. Moreover, design operations have been conceptualised as transitions between states of the explored design space, thus providing a basis for the state-transition model. The developed models and the accompanying computational tool fulfilled the purpose of supporting research activity. The results of the protocol analysis and computational simulation studies indicate that the model can be used to identify, analyse and simulate sequences of design operations which are distinctive for specific working processes, such as divergent and convergent team conceptual design activities, as well as for a systematic approach to conceptual design. The experimental findings which could have been compared to the insight from the available literature have been found aligned with the current understanding of designing in teams. Based on the listed findings, it can be argued that the developed state-transition model provides more flexibility when it comes to capturing and comparing the patterns of analysis, synthesis and evaluation design operations in the problem and the solution space and offers the potential of improving design process understanding through either protocol analysis or computational studies of team conceptual design activity.