A METHOD TO STUDY AFFECTIVE DYNAMICS AND PERFORMANCE IN ENGINEERING DESIGN TEAMS
Year: 2011
Editor: Culley, S.J.; Hicks, B.J.; McAloone, T.C.; Howard, T.J. & Badke-Schaub, P.
Author: Jung, Malte Friedrich; Leifer, Larry J.
Series: ICED
Section: Human Behaviour in Design
Page(s): 244-253
Abstract
The practice of designing in teams is a socially mediated activity. Team members interact with one another to generate and develop concepts and physical artifacts over time. Researchers explored many different aspects of design interactions in order to generate new insights and theory about how interaction characteristics and performance relate. Despite many years of research not much has been done to explore the role of emotions in the context of the relationship of interaction dynamics and performance. The authors attribute this lack of research mainly to a lack of appropriate research methods to study emotions. In this paper we show that methods developed to study emotions in marital interactions can be used to study emotions in design team interactions. We describe the key components of such a method and share insights gained from its application three cases.
Keywords: THIN SLICING; SYSTEMATIC OBSERVATION OF BEHAVIOR; PERFORMANCE; EMOTIONS; AFFECTIVE DYNAMICS