Design team decision-making underpins all activities in the design process. Simultaneously, goal alignment within design teams has been shown to be essential to the success of team activities, including engineering design. However, the relationship between goal alignment and design team decision-making remains unclear. In this exploratory work, we analyze six student design teams’ decision-making strategies underlying 90 selections of design methods over the course of a human-centered design project. We simultaneously examine how well each design team’s goals are aligned in terms of their perception of shared goals and their awareness of team members’ personal goals at the midpoint and end of the design process, along with three other factors underpinning team alignment at the midpoint. We report three preliminary findings about how team goal alignment and goal awareness influence team decision-making strategy that, while lacking consistent significance, invite further research. First, we observe that a decrease in awareness of team members’ personal goals may lead student teams to use a different distribution of decision-making strategies in design than teams whose awareness stays constant or increases. Second, we find that student teams exhibiting lower overall goal alignment scores appear to more frequently use agent-driven decision-making strategies, while student teams with higher overall goal alignment scores appear to more frequently use process-driven decision-making strategies. Third, we find that while student team alignment appears to influence agent- and process-driven strategy selection, its effect on outcome-driven selection is less conclusive. While grounded in student data, these findings provide a starting place for further inquiry into of designerly behavior at the nexus of teaming and design decision-making.

Increasingly digital products and services make cybersecurity a crucial issue for designers. However, human-centered designers struggle to consider it in their work, partially a consequence of the high psychological distance between designers and cybersecurity. In this work, we build on the Design for Cybersecurity (DfC) Cards, an intervention to help designers consider cybersecurity, and examine a project-based design course to understand how and why specific DfC cards were used. Three findings result. First, designers found the intervention useful across all design phases and activities. Second, the cards helped design teams refocus their attention on the problem domain and project outcome. Third, we identify a need for support in framing and converging during user research, opportunity identification, and prototyping. We argue that the psychological distance between designers and the problem space of cybersecurity partially explains these findings, and ultimately exacerbates existing challenges in the design process. These findings suggest that design interventions must consider the psychological distance between designer and problem space, and have application in design practice across many complex problem domains.

Designers' choices of methods are well known to shape project outcomes. However, questions remain about why design teams select particular methodsand how teams' decision-making strategies are influenced by project- and process-based factors. In this work, we analyze novice design teams' decision-making strategies underlying 297 selections of human-centered design methods over the course of three semester-long project-based engineering design courses. We propose a framework grounded in 100+ factors sourced from new product development literature that classifies design teams' method selection strategy as either agent-, outcome-, or process-driven, with eight further subclassifications. Coding method selections with this framework, we uncover three insights about design team method selection. First, we identify fewer outcomes-based selection strategies across all phases and innovation types. Second, we observe a shift in decision-making strategy from user-focused outcomes in earlier phases to product-based outcomes in later phases. Third, we observe that decision-making strategy produces a greater heterogeneity of method selections as compared to the class average as a whole, or project type alone. These findings provide a deeper understanding of designers' method selection behavior and have implications for effective management of design teams, development of automated design support tools to aid design teams, and curation of design method repositories, e.g., theDesignExchange.

Designing an innovation strategy in a world of rapid technological change has become increasingly challenging. Some companies are finding that anchoring technology choices in deeper understanding of the value users seek allows them to find a better balance among feasibility, viability, and desirability of potential solutions, and thus create more successful user outcomes. They do so by involving designers earlier in the roadmap development to guide product and technology selection, toward a future vision based on user value and aspirations. In this article, we extend two streams of prior research on technology roadmapping (TRM) and design roadmapping (DRM). First, we identify and compare technology and DRM approaches and their distinct strategic emphases: Technology selection and user value, respectively. Second, we compare two cases of DRM deployment in corporations: Siemens and Air France-KLM. The intent is to provide an in-depth understanding of why and how DRM complements TRM and how DRM facilitates making tradeoffs among strategic goals to more comprehensively address the feasibility, viability, and desirability of new product and service designs. We find that DRM embeds a deep understanding of current and future user needs, linking user-centered design and technology selection to strategy in practice.

Recommendations of sustainable design methods are usually based on theory, not empirical industry tests. Furthermore, since professionals often mix components of different design methods, recommending whole methods may not be relevant. It may be better to recommend component activities or mindsets. To provide empirical grounding for recommendations, this study performed 23 workshops on three sustainable design methods involving over 172 professionals from 27 companies, including consultancies and manufacturers in three industries (consumer electronics, furniture and clothing). The design methods tested were The Natural Step, Whole System Mapping and Biomimicry. Participants were surveyed about what components in each design method drove perceived innovation, sustainability or other value, and why. The most valued components only partially supported theoretical predictions. Thus, recommendations should be more empirically based. Results also found unique and complementary value in components of each method, which suggests recommending mixed methods for sustainable design. This may help design professionals find more value in green design practices, and thus integrate sustainability more into their practice.

We propose the use of projection mapping as a prototyping tool to create an experimentation environment to design, evaluate, and control immersion experience in future autonomous vehicles. As the first step, we conducted expert interviews with professionals in the automotive industry to understand the general implications of prototyping tools in future mobility solution development and their usefulness in concept test settings. The interview results reveal that projection mapping is one popular prototyping method for automotive professionals to demonstrate immersive future user scenarios. The paper includes additional insights from the interviews and current work-in-progress.