Impacts of Team Characteristics and Design Activities on Design Outcomes

Author(s):  
Shun Takai

This paper presents an analysis of design team characteristics and design activities that are significantly associated with design outcomes (i.e., project performances) in sophomore-level project-based design courses. Besides efficient team work, a team needs to successfully perform three design activities: concept generation, concept selection, and prototyping. In the design course, teams are formed based on students’ choice of teammates as well as on instructor assigned teams which maximize cognitive mode diversity among members. A regression analysis is performed to find variables that are significantly associated with design outcomes. These variables include team size, teaming preference, diversity of cognitive modes among team members, the average number of power tools team members have used in the past, whether or not a team experienced a team-working difficulty, the number of concepts generated before and after using creativity techniques, whether or not a team had the most successful strategy (called “winning” concept in this study) in a set of concepts from which one concept is chosen for prototyping, and timing of selecting the winning concept (at concept selection, at proof-of-concept testing, or at final testing). Design strategies used by teams, the winning concepts, results of regression analysis (variables significantly associated with design outcomes) are discussed.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuri Hamamatsu ◽  
Hiroo Ide ◽  
Michiru Kakinuma ◽  
Yuji Furui

BACKGROUND The health conditions of Japanese salespersons may be adversely affected by their lifestyle. Face-to-face or on-site health interventions are not convenient for salespersons because of their tendency for out-of-office sales. Previous studies showed that mobile health (mHealth) interventions (compared to usual practice) have great potential to promote physical activity. For Japanese salespersons, mHealth can offer additional convenience to change their physical activity habits because they can access the mHealth contents anytime and anywhere. However, the specific elements that are most important to maintain physical activity levels using an mHealth approach remain unclear. OBJECTIVE We aimed to identify elements that account for both a high average physical activity level and can help to prevent a decrease in physical activity during a 9-week intervention period. METHODS Salespersons were recruited from 11 Japanese companies. A team-based walking intervention was held from October to December 2018 (for a total of 9 weeks), during which the walking step data were recorded by smartphone apps. Average walking steps of each participant during the intervention and the difference in walking steps between the initial and the final week were respectively used as dependent variables. The effects of team characteristics (ie, frequency of communication with team members and team size) and behavioral characteristics (ie, number of days with recorded steps on the apps) on the average walking steps, and the difference in walking steps between the initial and the final week were estimated using multiple and multilevel regression analyses. RESULTS Of the 416 participants, walking step data of 203 participants who completed postintervention assessments were included in the analyses. Multiple regression analysis of the average walking steps showed that the number of days with recorded steps was positively correlated with the log-transformed average walking steps (β=.01, <i>P</i>&lt;.001). Multilevel analysis of the average walking steps considering the company level estimated that the intraclass correlation coefficient was 37%. This means that belonging to the same company largely affected an individual’s average walking steps. Multiple regression analysis of the difference in walking steps showed that communication with team members once or twice a week correlated with preventing a decrease in walking steps from the initial to the final week (β=1539.4, <i>P</i>=.03), and being on a larger team correlated with a decrease in walking steps from the initial to the final week (β=–328.4, <i>P</i>=.01). CONCLUSIONS This study showed that the elements accounting for high average walking steps and those preventing the decrease in walking steps from the initial to the final week differed. Behavioral characteristics correlated positively with average walking steps. Team characteristics (ie, regular communication and a smaller team size) significantly correlated with preventing a decrease in walking steps.


Author(s):  
Mohammad Alsager Alzayed ◽  
Scarlett R. Miller ◽  
Jessica Menold ◽  
Jacquelyn Huff ◽  
Christopher McComb

Abstract Research on empathy has been surging in popularity in the engineering design community since empathy is known to help designers develop a deeper understanding of the users’ needs. Because of this, the design community has been invested in devising and assessing empathic design activities. However, research on empathy has been primarily limited to individuals, meaning we do not know how it impacts team performance, particularly in the concept generation and selection stages of the design process. Specifically, it is unknown how the empathic composition of teams, average (elevation) and standard deviation (diversity) of team members’ empathy, would impact design outcomes in the concept generation and selection stages of the design process. Therefore, the goal of the current study was to investigate the impact of team trait empathy on concept generation and selection in an engineering design student project. This was accomplished through a computational simulation of 13,482 teams of noninteracting brainstorming individuals generated by a statistical bootstrapping technique drawing upon a design repository of 806 ideas generated by first-year engineering students. The main findings from the study indicate that the elevation in team empathy positively impacted simulated teams’ unique idea generation and selection while the diversity in team empathy positively impacted teams’ generation of useful ideas. The results from this study can be used to guide team formation in engineering design.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Nolte ◽  
Christopher McComb

Abstract The engineering design process can produce stress that endures even after it has been completed. This may be particularly true for students who engage with the process as novices. However, it is not known how individual components of the design process induce stress in designers. This study explored the cognitive experience of introductory engineering design students during concept generation, concept selection and physical modelling to identify stress signatures for these three design activities. Data were collected for the design activities using pre- and post-task surveys. Each design activity produced distinct markers of cognitive experience and a unique stress signature that was stable across design activity themes. Rankings of perceived sources of stress also differed for each design activity. Students, however, did not perceive any physiological changes due to the stress of design for any of the design activities. Findings indicate that physical modelling was the most stressful for students, followed by concept generation and then concept selection. Additionally, recommendations for instructors of introductory engineering design courses were provided to help them apply the results of this study. Better understanding of the cognitive experience of students during design can support instructors as they learn to better teach design.


10.2196/16159 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (7) ◽  
pp. e16159
Author(s):  
Yuri Hamamatsu ◽  
Hiroo Ide ◽  
Michiru Kakinuma ◽  
Yuji Furui

Background The health conditions of Japanese salespersons may be adversely affected by their lifestyle. Face-to-face or on-site health interventions are not convenient for salespersons because of their tendency for out-of-office sales. Previous studies showed that mobile health (mHealth) interventions (compared to usual practice) have great potential to promote physical activity. For Japanese salespersons, mHealth can offer additional convenience to change their physical activity habits because they can access the mHealth contents anytime and anywhere. However, the specific elements that are most important to maintain physical activity levels using an mHealth approach remain unclear. Objective We aimed to identify elements that account for both a high average physical activity level and can help to prevent a decrease in physical activity during a 9-week intervention period. Methods Salespersons were recruited from 11 Japanese companies. A team-based walking intervention was held from October to December 2018 (for a total of 9 weeks), during which the walking step data were recorded by smartphone apps. Average walking steps of each participant during the intervention and the difference in walking steps between the initial and the final week were respectively used as dependent variables. The effects of team characteristics (ie, frequency of communication with team members and team size) and behavioral characteristics (ie, number of days with recorded steps on the apps) on the average walking steps, and the difference in walking steps between the initial and the final week were estimated using multiple and multilevel regression analyses. Results Of the 416 participants, walking step data of 203 participants who completed postintervention assessments were included in the analyses. Multiple regression analysis of the average walking steps showed that the number of days with recorded steps was positively correlated with the log-transformed average walking steps (β=.01, P<.001). Multilevel analysis of the average walking steps considering the company level estimated that the intraclass correlation coefficient was 37%. This means that belonging to the same company largely affected an individual’s average walking steps. Multiple regression analysis of the difference in walking steps showed that communication with team members once or twice a week correlated with preventing a decrease in walking steps from the initial to the final week (β=1539.4, P=.03), and being on a larger team correlated with a decrease in walking steps from the initial to the final week (β=–328.4, P=.01). Conclusions This study showed that the elements accounting for high average walking steps and those preventing the decrease in walking steps from the initial to the final week differed. Behavioral characteristics correlated positively with average walking steps. Team characteristics (ie, regular communication and a smaller team size) significantly correlated with preventing a decrease in walking steps.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hernan Casakin ◽  
Petra Badke-Schaub

This study deals with the role of mental models in the coordination of team activities during design problem-solving. The work centers on the sharedness of mental models in a design team setting, mainly on the interaction between an architect and two clients. A major goal is to gain insight into how modifications in mental models affect coordination, and how sharedness develops through the process. Our focus is to explore, through a case study, the individual contributions of the architect and the clients to coordination of the work process, and how sharedness of the development of the team mental model evolves in the early stage of concept generation. Our claim is that work teams develop a certain degree of sharedness of the mental models of individual team members during information exchange. This team mental model can be insufficient or even wrong, but as long as the team members feel agreement in the team, they coordinate their work on that basis. Thus, sharedness of mental models is believed to be a powerful team asset, especially when it is reached in the earlier phases of the design process. Our findings suggest that in order to attain sharedness among design team members, design activities related to the task mental model should be encouraged, specifically the generation of new ideas and the analysis of solutions. Implications for practice and education are suggested.


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (21) ◽  
pp. 49-63
Author(s):  
Zdzisław Kaliniewicz ◽  
Piotr Markowski ◽  
Andrzej Anders ◽  
Paweł Tylek ◽  
Zbigniew Krzysiak ◽  
...  

The basic dimensions and the mass of common beech nuts and seeds from five nut batches, harvested from tree stands in northern Poland, were determined. Environmental conditions had a greater influence on seed plumpness than the age of tree stands. The results of measurements were analyzed statistically by analysis of variance, correlation analysis and linear regression analysis. Despite differences in their plumpness, nuts were characterized by nearly identical cross-sections which resembled an equilateral triangle. The thickness of nuts and seeds was highly correlated with their mass, and this information can facilitate seed husking and separation into mass categories. Before and after husking, seeds should be separated with the use of a mesh screen with longitudinal openings. Medium-sized (most numerous) seeds were separated into the following plumpness categories using a screen separator with ≠6 mm and ≠7 mm openings: 84% of moderately plump seeds, 3% of seeds with reduced plumpness, and 13% of plump seeds.


Database ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faisal M Fadlelmola ◽  
Kais Ghedira ◽  
Yosr Hamdi ◽  
Mariem Hanachi ◽  
Fouzia Radouani ◽  
...  

Abstract African genomic medicine and microbiome datasets are usually not well characterized in terms of their origin, making it difficult to find and extract data for specific African ethnic groups or even countries. The Pan-African H3Africa Bioinformatics Network (H3ABioNet) recognized the need for developing data portals for African genomic medicine and African microbiomes to address this and ran a hackathon to initiate their development. The two portals were designed and significant progress was made in their development during the hackathon. All the participants worked in a very synergistic and collaborative atmosphere in order to achieve the hackathon's goals. The participants were divided into content and technical teams and worked over a period of 6 days. In response to one of the survey questions of what the participants liked the most during the hackathon, 55% of the hackathon participants highlighted the familial and friendly atmosphere, the team work and the diversity of team members and their expertise. This paper describes the preparations for the portals hackathon and the interaction between the participants and reflects upon the lessons learned about its impact on successfully developing the two data portals as well as building scientific expertise of younger African researchers. Database URL: The code for developing the two portals was made publicly available in GitHub repositories: [https://github.com/codemeleon/Database; https://github.com/codemeleon/AfricanMicrobiomePortal].


Author(s):  
K. Scott Marshall ◽  
Richard Crawford ◽  
Matthew Green ◽  
Daniel Jensen

Recent research has investigated methods based on design-by-analogy meant to enhance concept generation. This paper presents Analogy Seeded Mind-Maps, a new method to prompt generation of analogous solution principles drawn from multiple analogical domains. The method was evaluated in two separate design studies using senior engineering students. The method begins with identifying a primary functional design requirement such as “eject part.” We used this functional requirement “seed” to generate a WordTree of grammatically analogical words for each design team. We randomly selected a set of words from each WordTree list with varying lexical “distances” from the seed word, and used them to populate the first-level nodes of a mind-map, with the functional requirement seed as the central hub. Design team members first used the word list to individually generate solutions and then performed team concept generation using the analogically seeded mind-map. Quantity and uniqueness of the resulting verbal solution principles were evaluated. The solution principles were further analyzed to determine if the lexical “distance” from the seed word had an effect on the evaluated design metrics. The results of this study show Analogy Seeded Mind-Maps to be useful tool in generating analogous solutions for engineering design problems.


2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (03) ◽  
pp. 199-220
Author(s):  
LUTZ GERICKE ◽  
RAJA GUMIENNY ◽  
CHRISTOPH MEINEL

We present the digital whiteboard system Tele-Board, which automatically captures all interactions made on the all-digital whiteboard and thus offers possibilities for a fast interpretation of usage characteristics. Analyzing team work at whiteboards is a time-consuming and error-prone process if manual interpretation techniques are applied. In a case study, we demonstrate how to conduct and analyze whiteboard experiments with the help of our system. The study investigates the role of video compared to an audio-only connection for distributed work settings. With the simplified analysis of communication data, we can prove that the video teams were more active than the audio teams and the distribution of whiteboard interaction between team members was more balanced. This way, an automatic analysis can not only support manual observations and codings, but also give insights that cannot be achieved with other systems. Beyond the overall view on one sessions focusing on key figures, it is also possible to find out more about the internal structure of a session.


2021 ◽  
pp. tobaccocontrol-2021-056629
Author(s):  
Gaurang P Nazar ◽  
Monika Arora ◽  
Nitika Sharma ◽  
Surbhi Shrivastava ◽  
Tina Rawal ◽  
...  

BackgroundIndia’s tobacco-free film and TV rules were implemented from 2012. To assess the effect of the rules, we studied tobacco depictions in top-grossing Bollywood films released between 2006 and 2017 and rule compliance after 2012.MethodsTobacco incidents and brand appearances were coded in 240 top-grossing Bollywood films (2006–2017) using the Breathe California method. Trends in number of tobacco incidents per film per year were studied before and after implementation of the rules using Poisson regression analysis. Compliance with rules over the years was studied using Pearson product-moment correlations.ResultsForty-five films were U-rated (all ages), 162 were UA-rated (below age 12 years must be adult-accompanied), and 33 were A-rated (age 18+ years only). Before implementation of the rules, the number of tobacco incidents per film was increasing by a factor of 1.1/year (95% CI 1.0 to 1.2, p=0.002). However, beginning year 2013, the number of incidents per film started falling significantly by a factor of 0.7/year (95% CI 0.6 to 0.9; p=0.012) compared with the previous increasing trend. The percentage of youth-rated (U and UA) films with any tobacco incidents also declined from a peak of 76% in 2012 to 35% in 2017. The percentage of films complying with the rules (audio-visual disclaimers, health spots, static warnings) did not change significantly from 2012 to 2017.ConclusionIndia’s 2012 rules were followed by a reduction in tobacco depictions in Bollywood films. Enhanced monitoring of compliance is needed to ensure the continued effectiveness of the rules.


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