Knowledge Integration and Collaboration in Design - WGUKNOW9

Goal(s)

The design of products is a collaborative and distributed activity that involves expertise from various domains (technical, marketing, design...). Interpersonal communication aspects are crucial. We have all experienced the difficulty of being understood by others when presenting an idea or explaining a constraint of our profession. This is due to problems with sharing knowledge and creating shared knowledge necessary for mutual understanding.
Effectively managing a team, leading a project meeting, or a group of experts is cognitively challenging. This course aims to highlight these mechanisms of mutual understanding and proposes tools that allow observation and understanding of the collaborative processes at work in project groups. The goal is to enable you to develop knowledge to establish the conditions for better collaboration in your future activities.

Content(s)

Situation 1: * Train ticket support design. Discovering design as a highly collaborative and knowledge-intensive activity.

Situation 2: * Delta game integrating communities of practice. Discovering mutual understanding, shared representations in synchronous design situations. Beginning to build an analysis grid of collaborative practices.

Situation 3: * In the G-SCOP experimentation room, designing, observing, and analyzing a collaboration situation. As a team, you will develop a complete protocol (design situation, data collection, analysis grid, analysis method). Example themes: "influence of time pressure on decision quality", "influence of knowledge sharing level on team performance", "influence of communication media type (remote/onsite) on design quality".

Theoretical contributions:
Characteristics of collaboration among experts, case studies, and illustration of concepts such as shared objects, knowledge sharing, shared representation...
Tools and methods for analyzing collaborative design situations. Presentation of the main research methods available today. Focus on protocol analysis and coding exercise.

Motivation to understand and analyse the collaboration issues in design. Motivation to develop methodological skills of analysis and observation. It is desirable that students have a good knowledge of the product design activity through students projects or work experience.