Influence of method and media interventions in creative remote design team collaboration

Design collaboration traditionally happens in person in the context of shared physical workspaces. The development of the Internet and collaborative communication platforms enable remote or distributed collaboration that can span across the globe. The growing ubiquity of remote work culture has impacted knowledge work, education, and design team collaboration. Remote collaboration has brought about benefits such as greater flexibility and autonomy in how employees spend their time and greater diversity of perspectives by collaborating across the globe. However, remote work also brings challenges to communication including challenges in building a shared vision and changes in behavioral communication. As collaborative computing technology evolves, so do user behaviors and team behaviors. Advances in bandwidth and hardware enable more natural conversations. Collaborative hardware such as virtual presence rooms or telepresence robots that enable remote communication can often be large and expensive which can be appropriate for corporate use but less appropriate for distributed individuals who require more accessible and less cumbersome technologies. This work builds upon the long history of the Center for Design Research (CDR) on design team collaboration, and in particular, gesturing, ideation, language evolution, remote collaborative tools, team diversity, interaction and communication, sketching and prototyping, digital capture, team dynamics, and conflict \& emotion and applies those findings and design implications to the individually distributed remote design team context. The research presented in this thesis asked: How does designer behavior change in the remote context? How can design process methods and media tools such as Brainstorming, Five-Whys, 2D media, and 3D media facilitate remote creative design team behavior?To understand remote design team creative collaboration, two online design studies were conducted looking at the influences design process methods and media tools had on team behavior. A Five-Why design process method interventions had positive impacts in aligning team conversation and the Brainstorming design process method helped reduce interruption for distributed design teams which both facilitate collaborative communication. The presence of 3D media for remote expert design pairs helped facilitate the occurrence of non-verbal expression through gestural activity which is associated with high creative design team performance. These findings can help to provide feedback and guidance to improve remote team collaboration, inform tool development to diagnose and facilitate remote team behavior, and provide insight for educating novice designers learning how to collaborate remotely. The research presented in this dissertation contributes to our understanding of creative remote design teams collaborating through the use of process method or media interventions that historically report improvements in team performance when used in traditional in-person design teams. These findings have implications for for improving pedagogy and lesson planning in engineering education, tighter coordination in teamwork, providing insight into common breakdowns to support new communication tool development, and indications for new ideation tools for creative hybrid work.

Keywords: Engineering.
Mechanical Engineering.
Advisor: Cutkosky Mark
AuernhammerJan Michael Kurt
Follmer Sean