Designing the Characteristics of Design Teams via Cognitively Ins.pdf

Teams are a ubiquitous part of the design process and a great deal of time and effort is devoted to managing them effectively. Although teams have the potential to search effectively for solutions, they are also prone to a number of pitfalls. Thus, a greater understanding of teams is necessary to ensure that they can function optimally across a variety of tasks. Teams are typically studied through controlled laboratory experiments or through longitudinal studies that observe teams in situ. However, both of these study types can be costly and time-consuming. Months, if not years, pass between the initial conception of a study and the final analysis of results. This work creates a computational framework that efficiently emulates human design teams, thus facilitating the derivation of a theory linking the properties of design problems to optimized team characteristics, effectively making it possible to design design teams.