Thesis (Ph. D.)--Open University. BLDSC no. DXN028515.

Communication is a challenge in multidisciplinary building design teams. The multidisciplinary nature of the team, in which team members contribute knowledge and skills from within the boundaries of their disciplinary domain, combined with the fragmented building design process, makes exchanging information among disciplines difficult. Addressing this challenge is important because communication impacts project outcomes. While effective communication mitigates project risk, contributes to conflict resolution, and reduces project waste and errors, ineffective communication contributes to project failure. Existing research on communication and teamwork provides us with two key insights: first, the presence of different disciplines – the functional diversity – on a team can lead to both positive and negative outcomes through different communication processes; then, communication in design includes three categories – communication as social behavior, as an information process, and the use of communication technology. However, this research comes from domains such as healthcare, manufacturing, and software design. As such, there are several gaps that limit our understanding of multidisciplinary building design communication: a. As literature on multidisciplinary building design teams is sparse, we do not have sufficient documented information about multidisciplinary building design practice to the extent that we use the terms multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary interchangeably although they indicate different kinds of team functioning. b. There are no approaches to studying communication in building design teams that account for the multidisciplinary nature of the team and the complexity of design communication. Identifying an approach to studying communication is a first step to improving team communication and project outcomes. c. Though it is acknowledged that functional boundaries in a multidisciplinary team influence team functioning, the lack of literature on multidisciplinary building design teams and the lack of an approach to studying team communication means that we do not know how functional diversity affects team communication and outcomes. My research contributes to our understanding of multidisciplinary building design team practice by developing a framework to explore multidisciplinary building design communication. Then, it applies the framework to three cases of multidisciplinary building design teams to explore the effects of functional diversity on building design team communication and outcomes. The exploratory framework allows for the systematic description and analysis of multidisciplinary building design teams, their communication, and their outcomes. When applied to the three cases, multidisciplinary building design practice is explored along three lines of inquiry: What constitutes a multidisciplinary building design team? How do multidisciplinary building design teams exchange information? And, what are multidisciplinary building design team outcomes? Data for the case studies are obtained from interviews of 32 industry experts spanning 13 disciplines across the three case studies. This data is analyzed using content analysis and a communication analysis approach that accounts for all three categories of communication. Findings from the case studies do the following: they posit a relationship between functional diversity, communication, and outcomes that is dependent not only on team characteristics, but also on project characteristics and timing; they offer modifications to the exploratory framework that allow for a more accurate representation of building design practice; and provide strategies used by team members to deal with the challenges and complexities of multidisciplinary building design communication. These contributions – the framework and the case study insights – provide building design researchers and practitioners with insights into building design teams, their communication, and their outcomes. They are intended to be a necessary first step towards improving building design team practice.

ITC/USA 2014 Conference Proceedings / The Fiftieth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 20-23, 2014 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, CA / The Mars Rover Design Team at Missouri University of Science and Technology developed a multifunctional rover for the Mars Society's University Rover Challenge. The main processor of the rover controls various rover subsystems based on commands received from a base station, acquires data from these subsystems, collects primary location and environmental data, and transmits information to the base station. The methodology and technical design of the processor hardware and software will be described in the overall context of the collaborative team development. The paper will also discuss the process, challenges and outcomes of working with limited resources on a student design team.

<p dir="ltr">In this research, I study the role of empathy in first-year engineering design teams. Engineering programs provide students with opportunities to practice and develop teamwork skills to help them become more effective team members. Thus, it is essential to understand factors that contribute to effective teaming experiences for engineering students. One key factor for promoting effective teaming experiences is empathy.</p>

The prevalence of Virtual Team (VT) configurations in organizations has come to challenge the relevance of traditional management practices based on traditional, physically collocated teams. Creativity—a topical and multidisciplinary issue—has been under-researched within the context of virtuality. Predicated on the premise that creativity may be expressed differently in the context of VTs, I draw the conceptual foundations for this research from the fields of virtuality (i.e. VTs) and creativity, and use engineering design as the empirical context, with the aim of pursuing a better understanding of creativity in relationship with virtuality in the context of Virtual Design Teams (VDTs). Design constitutes a pertinent empirical context because (a) designers have to deliver outputs requiring creativity; and (b) their work is increasingly accomplished in VDT environments. I report on the findings from three case studies involving temporary VDTs. Studies 1 and 2 comprised student engineers. Study 3 was a comparative case study focusing on a team of professional engineers, who completed one design task while physically collocated (face-to-face, F2F) and another one while geographically dispersed (virtually), with the aim of isolating factors that are unique to virtuality. With an interpretive stance guiding this research, the same analytical approach for each case study, and with the team serving as the unit of analysis, I analysed the collected data (interview data, observations, video recordings, photographic material, documents, communication extracts, design and other outputs) qualitatively with the use of visual and thematic analysis. The thesis makes the following theoretical contributions: (a) it advances understanding of creativity within the VDT lifecycle; (b) it elicits factors influencing creativity in the temporary VDT context; and (c) it explains how the unique characteristics of virtuality influence creativity within this context. The thesis’ limitations as well as implications for research and practice are also discussed.

Development of complex products and large systems is a highly interactive social process involving hundreds of people designing thousands of interrelated components and making millions of coupled decisions. Nevertheless, in the research summarized by this paper, we have created methods to study the development process, identify its underlying structures, and critique its operation. In this article, we introduce three views of product development complexity: a process view, a product view, and an organization view. We are able to learn about the complex social phenomenon of product development by studying the patterns of interaction across the decomposed elements within each view. We also compare the alignment of the interaction patterns between the product, process, and organization domains. We then propose metrics of product development complexity by studying and comparing these interaction patterns. Finally, we develop hypotheses regarding the patterns of product development interactions, which will be helpful to guide future research. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

Sustainability is quickly becoming a “buzz word” in today’s environmentally conscious world from political leaders to building professionals to design experts to consumers as they rethink their impact on current healthy, efficient indoor/outdoor environments as well as long term benefits to future generations. This paper seeks to investigate ways to increase the structural engineer’s influence over the sustainability of the building industry by using integrated design teams. It explores current practices within the building industry, in particular the housing industry and the ways in which the integrated design team differs from most current practices. It strives to promote the positive impact an integrated design team with structural engineers on board from the onset has on the design process as far as time, cost, and environmental concerns are considered. This paper continues by establishing methods for measuring the success of an integrated design team,its effects on sustainability, and how the structural engineer was involved. The focus of this paper is the New Norris House class project: its background and the integrated design team’s process as it differs from the traditional design concept. The results of the project including the LEED and HERS rating and material efficiency and the impact of the structural engineer’s inputs from the onset will be discussed. The paper ends with a discussion on the differences between the educational and professional community and how integrated design teams are an efficient and cost effective way to achieve high levels of sustainability.

Sustainability is quickly becoming a “buzz word” in today’s environmentally conscious world from political leaders to building professionals to design experts to consumers as they rethink their impact on current healthy, efficient indoor/outdoor environments as well as long term benefits to future generations.This paper seeks to investigate ways to increase the structural engineer’s influence over the sustainability of the building industry by using integrated design teams. It explores current practices within the building industry, in particular the housing industry and the ways in which the integrated design team differs from most current practices. It strives to promote the positive impact an integrated design team with structural engineers on board from the onset has on the design process as far as time, cost, and environmental concerns are considered. This paper continues by establishing methods for measuring the success of an integrated design team,its effects on sustainability, and how the structural engineer was involved.The focus of this paper is the New Norris House class project: its background and the integrated design team’s process as it differs from the traditional design concept. The results of the project including the LEED and HERS rating and material efficiency and the impact of the structural engineer’s inputs from the onset will be discussed. The paper ends with a discussion on the differences between the educational and professional community and how integrated design teams are an efficient and cost effective way to achieve high levels of sustainability.

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The world of engineering design finds itself at a crossroads. The technical and scientifically rooted tools that propelled humankind into the modern age are now insufficient as evidenced by a growing number of failures to meet design expectations and to deliver value for users and society in general. In the empirical world, a growing consensus among many design practitioners has emerged that engineering design efforts are becoming too unmanageable and too complex for existing design management systems and tools. One of the key difficulties of engineering design is the coordination and management of the underlying collaboration processes. Development efforts that focus on the design of complex artefacts, such as a satellite or information system, commonly require the interaction of hundreds to thousands of different disciplines. What makes these efforts and the related collaboration processes complex from the perspective of many practitioners is the strong degree of interdependency between design decision-making occurring, often concurrently, across multiple designers who commonly reside in different organizational settings. Not only must a design account for and satisfice these dependencies, but it must remain also acceptable to all design participants. Design in effect represents a coevolution between the problem definition and solution, with a finalized design approach arising not from a repeatable series of mathematical optimizations but rather through the collective socio-technical design activities of a large collaboration of designers. Despite the importance of understanding design as a socio-technical decision-making entity, many of the existing design approaches ignore socio-technical issues and often view them as either too imprecise or too difficult to consider. This research provides a performance measurement framework to explore these factors by investigating design as a socio-technical complex adaptive collaborative process between the designer, artefact, and user (DAU). The research implements this framework through an agent-based model, the Complex Adaptive Performance Evaluation Method for Collaboration Design (C2D). This approach allows a design management analyst to generate insights about potential design strategies and mechanisms as they relate to design complexity by examining the simulated performance of a design collaboration as it explores theoretical design fitness landscapes with various degrees of ruggedness. / Ph. D.