Impacts of Team Characteristics and Design Activities on Design Outcomes

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.