Bellamy, T; Williams, A; Sher, W; Sherratt, S and Gameson, R (2005) Design communication: Issues confronting both co-located and virtual teams. In: Khosrowshahi, F (ed.) Proceedings of 21st Annual ARCOM Conference, 7-9 September 2005, London, UK.
Abstract
Today's design activities are usually conducted in teams of professionals who represent different design domains, e.g. architects and engineers. . Within these teams clear and accurate communication of design and technical concepts and information is critical. A current trend is for the conduct and management of these teams to move towards working more in virtual environments. The use of high bandwidth Information and Communication Technologies (ICT's) is increasing and with this increase is the need to better understand those generic skills, such as communication, which contribute to the successful application of the ICT hardware and software. Communication skills have been identified as an important factor which may be affected in the transition from co-located team collaboration to the virtual environment. These issues usually manifest themselves in the ability of team members to use both visual and verbal forms of communication concurrently. Also of significance is the importance of "cues" in communication interactions during collaboration, this resulting in less effective achievement of shared understanding among team members. This paper reports on industry based research of both co-located and virtual teams involved in the activity of designing. It concentrates on the communication between team members. The results of this research identify a range of communication issues which confront these teams in their design activities which will inform, in association with other factors being researched, which are outside the scope of this paper, the development of skills auditing and mapping tools.
| Item Type: | Conference Paper (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | communication; design process; interaction; virtual teams |
| Index terms: | interaction, communication skill, mapping, collaboration, architect, hardware, engineer, virtual environment, design process, information and communication technology, virtual team, team collaboration |
| Subjects: | behavioral psychology, information systems, collaborative management, spatial and geospatial analysis, management, virtual reality, profession, computing systems, computer hardware, design methods |
| Topics: | Organizational Design, Digital Applications, Design Practice, Roles and Professions, Research Practice, Project Management |
| Descriptive scope: | 2 PC |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here