Time Variation of Design “story Telling” in Engineering Design Teams

Engineering design practice can be viewed as a process of “story telling,” where the “stories” generated explore various aspects of the design process and the designed artefact. This paper focuses on the study of the design process by using computational linguistics to analyze time variant patterns of “story telling” in eight multidisciplinary student design teams at the University of California at Berkeley, USA. We examine the oral and written histories left by the designers through their documentation, presentation material, and e-mail communication. A formal, quantitative methodology for time variant analysis of “story telling” in engineering design teams based on metrics of semantic coherence is established. Results from the analysis suggest a positive correlation between design outcomes and patterns of the average semantic coherence over time as well as with variation in semantic coherence between design stages. This research provides empirical evidence of the phenomena of changing levels of coherence in “story telling” in design and the scope of design concepts explored by design teams. Further, we show that both the e-mail data set and the documentation data sets contain approximately the same amount of “story telling” capacity.