Distinguishing and measuring “Communication While Designing” and “Design Communication” in team design

This paper presents empirical support for the notion that measuring communication from a design perspective produces different results to when measured from a communication perspective. Two types of communications: “communication while designing” and “design communication” can be distinguished in team design activities. In order to measure and compare the underlying structure of these two types of communication, we constructed two communication models and operationalized them into two segmentation and coding approaches. The paper presents a case study that applied these segmentation approaches to a video protocol of a team design activity. The segmented design session was firstly analyzed by examining the temporally-distributed turn-taking frequencies along the progression of the designing process. The team design activities in this case study, framed by these two different communication models, exhibited a similar overall structure. Information exchanges accelerated towards the end of the design session. The data were then analyzed with a first-order Markov model. Transitions between adjacent communication segments revealed the formation of subteams beneath the overall team. In addition, intra-personal design communications between different design issues seemed to be the primary contributors to the design processes of the team moderator and that inter-personal design communication is important across the entire design processes. These preliminary results indicate that simply modeling “communication” while designing is insufficient to capture the designerly nature of design communication