Visualising Collaboration in Very Large Design Teams

The scale of design teams for complex engineering products poses problems associated with the representation of the activities and interactions of designers on a social level. Conventional project management representations of organisation charts and graphs about deliverables are not likely to offer understandable overviews about how the team is performing on a social level. The aim of this article is to describe a new way to represent design activities through information visualisation using rules relating to language-based descriptions of actions, events, and objects in design team communication. We developed new methods in the field of information visualisation to represent patterns in design team communication that may indicate the social accounting of teamwork. We tested the method on a conversation during the conceptual design of a consumer artefact by a welldescribed team in the research literature to test whether our visualisation method could uncover some dynamics of teamwork.