ABSTRACT
Multidisciplinary teams are key in tackling the complexity of the artifact designed. In this article, we study multidisciplinary teams’ design behaviors by combining protocol analysis, Natural Language Processing and network science. We analyzed three teams composed of professional mechanical and electrical engineers. All the teams engaged in designing with similar processes and spend more cognitive effort on evaluating their design when collaborating. Teams produce new concepts, expanding their design space, as they develop a solution. Creating a network of concepts explored based on designers’ disciplines illustrates the influence of context knowledge on the teams’ design spaces. Results, from this study, suggest that mechanical engineers tend to tackle user-centered issues while electrical engineers focused more on product-related one. Interestingly, for most of the concepts covered (e.g., end users, technological aspects) we observed collaboration between disciplines. Using networks to represent design spaces could become a tool to support team design collaboration by providing a mind map of concepts explored along the design process.
